If there are no restrictions on the extent to which government plans can be made contingent, then there is some Paretian government with an optimal plan that never reaches a node at which deviation from the plan would yield a Pareto improvement. (At unreached nodes deviations from the optimal...

We give rigorous game-theoretic meaning to the Stackelberg notions of time inconsistency and to the idea of commitment being of value (or sequential irrationality). Time inconsistency treats desirable deviations only along the path, whereas sequential irrationality treats deviations everywhere...

The paper offers a game-theoretic framework for discussing commitment and time consistency. We show when a commitment (or just the appearance of one) is valuable, how valiable it is, and whether the commitment is time consistent. We formulate restrictions on the set of eligible commitments....

The paper formalizes several of the ideas about commitment set out by Thomas Schelling in 'The Strategy of Conflict'. Using a game-theoretic framework we formalize and interpret 'promise' and 'threat' as different species of commitment. We also distinguish the 'pure promise', the 'pure threat',...