Consider an environment with widespread externalities, and suppose that binding agreements can be written. We study coalition formation in such a setting. Our analysis proceeds by defining on a partition function an extensive form bargaining game. We establish the existence of a stationary...

We introduce an extension of the Esteban and Ray [Econometrica, 1994] measure of polarization that can be applied to density functions. As a by-product we also derive the Wolfson [AER, 1994] measure as a special case. This derivation has the virtue of casting both measures in the context of a...

Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in parts of the developing world. Estimates suggest that more than 200 million women are demographically 'missing' worldwide. To explain the global 'missing women' phenomenon, research has mainly focused on excess female...

A game of love and hate is one in which a player's payoff is a function of her own action and the payoffs of other players. For each action profile, the associated payoff profile solves an interdependent utility system, and if that solution is bounded and unique for every profile we call the...

A sender sells an object of unknown quality to a receiver who pays his expected value for it. Sender and receiver might hold different priors over quality. The sender commits to a monotone categorization of quality. We characterize the sender's optimal monotone categorization, the optimality of...

Harsanyi (1974) criticized the von Neumann-Morgenstern notion of a stable set on the grounds that it implicitly assumes coalitions to be shortsighted in evaluating their prospects. He proposed a modification of the dominance relation to incorporate farsightedness. In doing so, however, Harsanyi...

This chapter surveys the sizable and growing literature on coalition formation. We refer to theories in which one or more groups of agents (“coalitions”) deliberately get together to jointly determine their actions. The defining idea of a coalition, in this chapter, is that of a group which...

Abstract We study long run implications of reinforcement learning when two players repeatedly interact with one another over multiple rounds to play a finite action game. Within each round, the players play the game many successive times with a fixed set of aspirations used to evaluate payoff...

This paper examines incentives of poor agents to escape poverty by saving. Owing to limited liability, low wealth creates borrowing constraints, preventing the poor from being able to finance productive projects. Future wealth increases resulting from current saving would relax these borrowing...