It will be shown that for rational players with a sufficiently large time horizon it is advantageous to keep promises and not to cheat even if cheating is the optimal behaviour in the short run. This explains why ethics could develop in a market economy where incentives to cheat are ubiquitous.

This paper studies a supply chain consisting of two suppliers and an assembler who also acts as a retailer in a single period model. The suppliers provide complementary modules to the assembler and the latter assembles the final products and sells them to meet a stochastic demand. Each supplier...

We study two kinds of buy-it-now options, temporary and permanent, under a theoretical model of Stackelberg game. In this two-stage game, the bidders, as the followers, use a two-threshold strategy to determine whether to bid or directly buy the item at the posted price, given an auction...

In this paper, we consider dynamic programming for the election timing in the majoritarian parliamentary system such as in Australia, where the government has a constitutional right to call an early election. This right can give the government an advantage to remain in power for as long as...

There are two well-studied timing games in economics: In a War of Attrition, having more predecessors helps; in a Pre-emption Game, more predecessors hurts. This paper introduces and explores a rich new spanning class of timing games with _rank-order payoffs_ that subsumes both timing games as...

The article presents a survey of theory concerning the "credibility" and "reputation" issues until the beginning of the 1990s, when new concept of "central bank independence" emerged. The "credibility problem" described by Kydland and Prescott means, that optimal policies become sub-optimal with...

We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for $k$ periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period; one vote is...

An important decision facing retailers is the level of price promotions or "sales" to have in their retail prices. In this paper, we consider the use of promotion-free (PF) retail pricing by stores selling durable products, where PF pricing means that the retailer does not use or advertise price...

In the online world, publishers place ads from advertisers adjacent to internet search results for a given keyword. To sell such advertising, web publishers auction multiple ad slots using a generalized second-price auction. In this paper, we compare two auction policies that publishers can use...