We follow the Nash program to provide a new strategic justification of the Talmud rule in bankruptcy problems. The design of our game is based on a focal axiomatization of the rule, which combines consistency with meaningful lower and upper bounds to all creditors. Our game actually considers bilateral negotiations, inspired by those bounds, which are extended to an arbitrary number of creditors, by

We provide an exact analytical solution of the Nash equilibrium for the kth price auction by using inverse of distribution functions. As applications, we identify the unique symmetric equilibrium where the valuations have polynomial distribution, fat tail distribution and exponential distributions.

We study Tullock contests with n symmetric players. We show that in a contest without an exit option, if prizes and punishments (negative prizes) have the same cost, it is optimal for the designer who wants to maximize the players’ total effort to allocate the entire prize sum to a single punishment without any prize. On the other hand, in a contest with an exit option, it is optimal to allocate the

We prove some interesting properties of unilaterally competitive games when there are more than two players. We show that such games possess: (1) a Nash equilibrium, (2) maximin-solvability, (3) strong solvability in the sense of Nash, and (4) weak acyclicity, all in pure strategies of finite or infinite games.

We study strong Nash equilibria in mixed strategies in finite games. A Nash equilibrium is strong if no coalition of players can jointly deviate so that all players in the coalition get strictly better payoffs. Our main result concerns games with two players and states that if a game admits a strong Nash equilibrium, then the payoff pairs in the support of the equilibrium lie on a straight line in

Joint debts are debts that more than one debtor guarantees mutually. They are sometimes interpreted as a version of the tragedy of the commons. However, a simple model of the dynamic tragedy of the commons fails to capture an important feature of joint debts. The authors model joint debts as a joint borrowing limit game and compare the model with the dynamic tragedy of the commons model. Thereby, the

This paper proposes a dynamic model for the process of industry consolidation by sequences of mergers and acquisitions that create synergy gains to merging firms and may impose positive or negative externalities on the remaining firms in the industry. We allow firms to make acquisition offers that are conditional and unconditional on acceptances of target firms, instead of the usual conditional offers

This paper is concerned with an old question: Will oligopolistic firms have incentives to merge to monopoly and will the monopoly, if the firms indeed merge, be stable? To answer this question, I motivate and introduce a new core concept for a general partition function game and prove stability of the merger-to-monopoly by applying the new core concept, labelled the strong-core, to Cournot oligopoly

We consider a bilateral oligopoly version of the Shapley window model with large traders, represented as atoms, and small traders, represented by an atomless part. For this model, we provide a general existence proof of a Cournot–Nash equilibrium that allows one of the two commodities to be held only by atoms. Then, we show, using a corollary proved by Shitovitz (Econometrica 41:467–501, 1973), that

In a class of asymmetric-cost duopoly price competition games, price-elastic individual demand reveals a threshold of informed buyers below which equilibrium is in monopoly prices. Even if the threshold is met, unless all buyers are informed, monopoly prices are listed and are more likely between less alike sellers. An increase in the efficient seller’s cost weakly reduces its rival’s price (in a first

We use a first-capacity-then-price-setting game as a theoretical benchmark for an experimental study which identifies capacity precommitment, intra-play communication, and prior experience as crucial factors for collusive pricing. The theoretical model determines capacity thresholds above which firms have an incentive to coordinate on higher than equilibrium prices. The experimental data confirm that

Given a set of combinatorial games, the children are all those games that can be generated using as options the games of the original set. It is known that the partial order of the children of all games whose birthday is less than a fixed ordinal is a distributive lattice and also that the children of any set of games form a complete lattice. We are interested in the converse. In a previous paper,

We introduce the idea that a player believes at every stage of a dynamic game that his opponents will choose rationally in the future and have chosen rationally in a restricted way in the past. This is summarized by the concept of common belief in future and restricted past rationality, which is defined epistemically. Moreover, it is shown that every properly rationalizable strategy of the normal form

We examine how democratic mechanisms can yield socially desirable outcomes in the presence of uncertainty about an underlying state of nature. We depart from a conventional mechanism design approach because we aim for democratic mechanisms to reflect some basic properties of decision-making in democracies. In particular, actual decisions are made by majority voting. The proposals to be voted upon are

This paper axiomatically studies the equal split-off set (cf. Branzei et al. (Banach Center Publ 71:39–46, 2006)) as a solution for cooperative games with transferable utility which extends the well-known Dutta and Ray (Econometrica 57:615–635, 1989) solution for convex games. By deriving several characterizations, we explore consistency of the equal split-off set on the domains of exact partition

What networks can form and persist when agents are self-interested? Can such networks be efficient? A substantial theoretical literature predicts that various networks emerge randomly and efficiency is unlikely to be sustained, but these predictions are in stark contrast to empirical findings. In this paper, we present a new model of network formation. In contrast to the existing literature, we assume

A game is solvable if the set of Nash equilibria is nonempty and interchangeable. A pairwise solvable game is a two-person symmetric game in which any restricted game generated by a pair of strategies is solvable. We show that the set of equilibria in a pairwise solvable game is interchangeable. Under a quasiconcavity condition, we derive a complete order-theoretic characterization and some topological

I study sequential first-price auctions where two items are sold to two bidders with private binary valuations. A seller, prior to the second auction, can publicly disclose some information about the outcome of the first auction. I characterize equilibrium strategies for various disclosure rules when the valuations of bidders are either perfectly positively or perfectly negatively correlated across

We develop a model of two parallel contests, asymmetric in quantity of homogeneous prizes open to contest, with a finite number of homogeneous risk-neutral bidders. Whether the bidder upon entry into a particular contest is aware of the realized number of competing contestants in the contest is irrelevant to the expected effort at equilibrium. At equilibrium the expected effort per capita in the larger

This paper extends the concept of face games, introduced by González-Díaz and Sánchez-Rodríguez (Games Econ Behav 62:100–105, 2008) for convex games, to the general class of balanced games. Each face of the core is the core of a face game and contains the best stable allocations for a coalition provided that the members of the complement coalition get their miminum worth inside the core. Since face

I study the following repeated version of Nash’s Demand Game: whenever the demands are not jointly compatible, the player who stated the lower demand (the less greedy player) obtains the following advantage: his offer is the only one “on the table”, and the greedier player needs to respond to this offer by either accepting it (which terminates the game) or rejecting it (which triggers a one-period

This paper studies a principal-agent relationship when both are risk-neutral and in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. Contracts must satisfy the limited-liability and monotonicity conditions. We provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal contract is simple, in the sense that each type is offered the same contract. These are: the action and the agent’s type are complements

We study the bilateral trading problem under private information. We characterize the range of possible mechanisms which satisfy ex-post efficiency, incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and budget balance. In particular, we show that the famous Myerson–Satterthwaite impossibility result no longer holds when contingent contracts are allowed.

We analyze a bargaining model which is a generalization of the model of Rubinstein (Econometrica 50(1):97–109, 1982) from the viewpoint of the process of how a proposer is decided in each period. In our model, a player’s probability to be a proposer depends on the history of proposers and players divide a pie of size 1. We derive a subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) and analyze how its SPE payoffs are

We develop a novel model of price-fee competition in bilateral oligopoly markets with non-expandable infrastructures and costly transportation. The model captures a variety of real market situations and it is the continuous quantity version of the assignment game with indivisible goods on a fixed network. We define and characterize stable market outcomes. Buyers exclusively trade with the supplier

We introduce set packing games as an abstraction of situations in which n selfish players select disjoint subsets of a finite set of indivisible items, and analyze the quality of several equilibria for this basic class of games. Special attention is given to a subclass of set packing games, namely throughput scheduling games, where the items represent jobs, and the subsets that a player can select

We introduce a new axiom for power indices, which requires the total (additively aggregated) power of the voters to be nondecreasing in response to an expansion of the set of winning coalitions; the total power is thereby reflecting an increase in the collective power that such an expansion creates. It is shown that total-power monotonic indices that satisfy the standard semivalue axioms are probabilistic

In two-sided markets with transferable utility (‘assignment games’), we study the dynamics of trade arrangements and price adjustments as agents from the two market sides stochastically match, break up, and re-match in their pursuit of better opportunities. The underlying model of individual adjustments is based on the behavioral theories of adaptive learning and aspiration adjustment. Dynamics induced

Core-selecting auctions were proposed as alternatives to the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism for environments with complementarities. In this paper, we consider a simple incomplete-information model that allows correlations among bidders’ values. We perform a full equilibrium analysis of three core-selecting auction formats as applied to the “local-local-global” model. We show that seller revenues

This article presents an axiomatic characterization of a new value for cooperative games with incomplete communication. The result is obtained by slight modifications of associated games proposed by Hamiache (Games Econ Behav 26:59–78, 1999; Int J Game Theory 30:279–289, 2001). This new associated game can be expressed as a matrix formula. We generate a series of successive associated games and show

In this paper, we introduce a solution concept generalizing the Harsanyi non-transferable utility (NTU) value to cooperative games with incomplete information. The so-defined S-solution is characterized by virtual utility scales that extend the Harsanyi-Shapley fictitious weighted-utility transfer procedure. We construct a three-player cooperative game in which Myerson’s (Int J Game Theory 13(2):69–96

We consider land rental problems where there are several communities that can act as lessors and a single tenant who does not necessary need all the available land. A rule should determine which communities become lessors, how much land they rent and at which price. We present a complete characterization of the family of rules that satisfy reassignment-proofness by merging and spliting, apart from

The problem of fair division of payoff is one of the key issues when considering cooperation of strategic individuals. It arises naturally in a number of applications related to operational research, including sharing the cost of transportation or dividing the profit among supply chain agents. In this paper, we consider the problem of extending the Shapley Value—a fundamental payoff division scheme—to

Riordan and Sappington (J Econ Theory 45:189–199, 1988) show that in an agency relationship in which the agent’s type is correlated with a public ex post signal, the principal may attain first best (full surplus extraction and efficient output levels) if the agent is faced with a lottery such that each type is rewarded for one signal realization and punished equally for all the others. Gary-Bobo and

A tournament can be represented as a set of candidates and the results from pairwise comparisons of the candidates. In our setting, candidates may form coalitions. The candidates can choose to fix who wins the pairwise comparisons within their coalition. A coalition is winning if it can guarantee that a candidate from this coalition will win each pairwise comparison. This approach divides all coalitions

In this paper, we address the question of the efficiency of weighted networks in a setting where nodes derive utility from their direct and indirect connections. Under rather general conditions, based on a set of assumptions about the value that connections in a weighted network generate, and about link-formation technology, we prove that any network is dominated by a special type of nested split graph

This paper provides conditions for a game with externalities to have a population monotonic allocation scheme (PMAS). We observe that the notion of convexity defined by Hafalir [Games Econ Behav 61:242–258, 2007] does not guarantee the existence of a PMAS in the presence of externalities. We introduce a new notion of convexity and show that while our convexity is not a stronger condition than Hafalir’s

This paper uses a novel experimental design to investigate the strategic value of making a public payoff sacrifice (“burning money”) in a setting modelled after the battle-of-the-sexes game. Unlike prior studies, we find that subjects choose to burn money in a significant portion of decision trials and that burning makes the first movers more likely to achieve their preferred stage two equilibrium

We consider a population of agents whose preference types are unobservable but imperfectly correlated with certain observable labels such as customs, languages, and origins. In addition, the matching process exhibits homophily: agents tend to interact with those who share the same labels. We show that labelling and homophily interact in a non-trivial way to influence the evolution of preferences, which