Many couples do not sign prenuptial agreements, even though this often leads to costly and inefficient litigation in case of divorce. In this paper we show that strategic reasons may prevent agents from signing a prenuptial agreement. Partners which have high productivity in marital activities...

We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market...

We study a dynamic optimal routing problem, where a controller has to decide to which of two queues should arriving customers (representing packets, messages, call etc...) be sent. The service rate in each queue may depend on the state of the system, may change in time and is unknown to the...

Exploiting small uncertainties on the part of opponents, players in long, finitely repeated games can maintain false reputations that lead to a large variety of equilibrium outcomes. Even cooperation in a finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma is obtainable. Can such false reputations be...

In this work we extend a result of Lehrer characterizing the correlated equilibrium payoffs in undiscounted two player repeated games with partial monitoring to the case in which the signals are permitted to be stochastic. In particular we develop appropriate versions of Lehrer's concepts of...

Reinforcement learning has proved quite successful in predicting subjects' adjustment behaviour in repeatedly played simple games. However, reinforcement learning does not predict convergence to the efficient cell in the minimal information game of mutual fate control, while earlier...

Most transplanted kidneys are from cadavers, but there are also substantial numbers of transplants from live donors. Recently, there have started to be kidney exchanges involving two donor-patient pairs such that each donor cannot give a kidney to the intended recipient because of immunological...

We study how social norms and individual rationality in the process of coalition formation sustain a particular form of collective inefficiency, namely excessive entry in the joint production and exploitation of an excludable good. We term this phenomenon the `tragedy of the clubs'. We model...

Most economic models implicitly or explicitly assume that interactions between economic agents are 'global' - in other words, each agent interacts in a uniform manner with every other agent. However, localized interactions between microeconomic agents are a pervasive feature of reality. What are...

In this paper, a model of interaction of formal and informal credit markets has been developed where the bank official (the ultimate provider of formal credit) faces a lending constraint. The bank official takes a bribe from the borrowers to disburse formal credit and he deliberately debars some...