Behavioral economics provides several motivations for the common observation that agents appear somewhat unwilling to deviate from recent choices: salience, inertia, the formation of habits, the use of rules of thumb, or the locking in on certain modes of behavior due to learning by doing. This...

We report experimental and theoretical results on the minority of three-game where three players have to choose one of two alternatives independently and the most rewarding alternative is the one chosen by a single player. This coordination game has many asymmetric equilibria in pure strategies...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

This paper provides a definition of epistemic stability of sets of strategy profiles, and uses it to characterize variants of curb sets in finite games, including the set of rationalizable strategies and minimal curb sets.

We present a theoretical model of a linear public good game in which heterogeneous players express social approval after observing contributions. The model explains how social approval is expressed and predicts positive contributions if subjects have a preference for social approval. Using a...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of how a systematic variation in the cognitive demands on subjects affects the optimal play. The innovation of this paper is the choice of a game, which we call the Game of Position. This is a two-player zerosum game characterized by a...

In this paper, we propose a game in which each player decides with whom to establish a costly connection and how much local public good is provided when benefits are shared among neighbors. We show that, when agents are homogeneous, Nash equilibrium networks are nested split graphs....

When truth conflicts with efficiency, can verbal communication destroy efficiency? Or are lies or vagueness used to hide inconvenient truths? We consider a sequential 2-player public good game in which the leader has private information about the value of the public good. This value can be low,...

We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable...

This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in an uncertain project, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procrastination. The collaboration dwindles over time, but never ceases as...