We investigate the outcome of bargaining when a player’s pay-off from agreement is risky. We find that a risk-averse player typically increases his equilibrium receipts when his pay-off is made risky. This is because the presence of risk makes individuals behave 'more patiently' in bargaining....

This report provides a conceptual foundation for the analysis of international regulatory co-operation (IRC) and its potential benefits through reduced trade costs. Different forms of IRC aiming to reduce specification, conformity assessment and information costs - which can arise from...

This study considers waiting times for populations to achieve efficient social coordination. Belloc and Bowles [1] conjecture that coalitional behavior will hasten such coordination. This turns out to be true when every member of the population interacts with every other member, but does not...

This paper considers marriage problems, roommate problems with nonempty core, and college admissions problems with responsive preferences. All stochastically stable matchings are shown to be contained in the set of matchings which are most robust to one-shot deviation.

We study the emergence of norms of cooperation in experimental economies populated by strangers interacting indefinitely. Can these economies achieve full efficiency even without formal enforcement institutions? Which institutions for monitoring and enforcement facilitate cooperation? Finally,...

This is a survey and discussion of work covering both formal game theory and experimental gaming prior to 1991. It is a useful preliminary introduction to the considerable change and emphasis which has taken place since that time where dynamics, learning, and local optimization have challenged...

Most of the theoretical work on collusion and price wars assumes identical firms and an unchanging environment, assumptions which are at odds with what we know about most industries. Further that literature focuses on the impact of collusion on prices. Whether an industry can support collusion...

This paper is concerned with the question of how to define the core when cooperation takes place in a dynamic setting. The focus is on dynamic cooperative games in which the players face a finite sequence of exogenously specified TU-games. Three different core concepts are presented: the...

What institutions can sustain cooperation in groups of strangers? Here we study the role of monetary systems. In an experiment, subjects sometimes needed help and sometimes could incur a cost to help an anonymous counterpart. In the absence of money, the intertemporal exchange of help, which...

This paper takes the idea of coalitional behavior – groups of people occasionally acting together to their mutual benefit – and incorporates it into the framework of evolutionary game theory that underpins the social learning literature. An equilibrium selection criterion is defined which we...