When considering engaging in conflict to secure control of a resource, a group needs to predict the amount of post-conflict leakage due to infiltration by members of losing groups. We use this insight to explain why conflict often takes place along ethnic lines, why some ethnic groups are more...

This paper compares the leader and follower payoff in a duopoly game, as they arise in sequential play, with the Nash payoff in simultaneous play. If the game is symmetric, has a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium, and players' payoffs are monotonic in the opponent's choice along their own best...

Speculative Attacks can be modeled as a coordination game with multiple equilibria if the state of the economy is common knowledge. With private information there is a unique equilibrium. This raises the question whether public information may be destabilizing by allowing for self-fulfilling...

This paper examines the process and outcomes of democratic decision-making in clubs where a club is defined by their sets of members whose preferences and decisions relate to the set of members in the club: the electorate to endogenous. Examples range from international organizations like the...

We analyze a class of sender-receiver games with quadratic payoffs, which includes the communication games in Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek (2008) and Rantakari (2008) as special cases, for which the receiver's maximum expected payoff when players have access to arbitrary, mediated...

A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters in history, but also on the range of actions available...

I present a model of social learning over an exogenous, directed network that may be readily nested within broader macroeconomic models with dispersed information and combines the attributes that agents (a) act repeatedly and simultaneously; (b) are Bayes-rational; and (c) have strategic...

A basic model of commitment is to convert a two-player game in strategic form to a “leadership game” with the same payoffs, where one player, the leader, commits to a strategy, to which the second player always chooses a best reply. This paper studies such leadership games for games with...

The paper presents a new meta data set covering 13 experiments on the social learning games by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). The large amount of data makes it possible to estimate the empirically optimal action for a large variety of decision situations and ask about the economic...

When fairly homogeneous taxpayers are affected by common income shocks, a tax agency’s optimal auditing strategy consists of auditing a low-income declarer with a probability that (weakly) increases with the other taxpayers’ declarations. Such policy generates a coordination game among...