This paper studies extensive form games with public information where all players have the same information at each point in time. We prove that when there are at least three players, all communication equilibrium payoffs can be obtained by unmediated cheap-talk procedures. The result...

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of Richard D. McKelvey and Thomas R. Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due in part to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. However, even with strong a...

A player i's actions in a game are determined by her beliefs about other players; these depend on the game's real-life context, not only its formal description. Define a game situation as a game together with such beliefs; call the beliefs— and i's resulting expectation—rational if there is...

"Hide-and-seek" games are zero-sum two-person games in which one player wins by matching the other's decision and the other wins by mismatching. Although such games are often played on cultural or geographic "landscapes" that frame decisions nonneutrally, equilibrium ignores such framing. This...

Reputation effects and other-regarding preferences have both been used to predict cooperative outcomes in markets with inefficient equilibria. Existing reputation-building models require either infinite time horizons or publicly observed identities, but cooperative outcomes have been observed in...

Empirical evidence suggests that banks often engage in refinancing of intrinsically insolvent debtors instead of writing off their nonperforming loans. Such forbearance lending may induce soft budget constraints for the debtors, diminishing their incentives to thwart default. This paper...

The efficiency hypothesis of institutional change is formulated in a general economic setting. The validity of this hypothesis depends on the specification of the new institution and the political process governing the institutional change. The issue is formulated as an implementation problem...

This paper examines an international mixed model in which a domestic state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes against a foreign labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing private firm. In the first stage, each firm independently decides whether or not to make a commitment to capacity....