Despite extensive use of bargaining models in economics and despite Becker's insistence on the importance of altruism in families, the theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into cooperative...

Traditional game theory studies strategic interactions in which the agents make rational decisions. Evolutionary game theory differs in two key respects: the focus is on large populations of individuals who interact at random rather than on small numbers of players; and individuals are assumed...

This chapter surveys a 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 within-group actions, while interacting noncooperatively across groups. The chapter describes...

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.

Suppose that players in a stochastic partnership have the option to quit and rematch anonymously. If stage-game payoffs are subject to a persistent initial shock, the (unique) social welfare-maximizing equilibrium induces a "dating" process in which all partners enjoy the full potential...

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...

We prove existence of stationary Markov perfect equilibria in an infinite-horizon model of legislative policy making in which the policy outcome in one period determines the status quo for the next. We allow for a multidimensional policy space and arbitrary smooth stage utilities, and we assume...

An evolutionary style model of recontracting is given which guarantees convergence to core allocations of an underlying cooperative game. Unlike its predecessors in the evolution/learning literature, this is achieved without assumptions of convexity of the characteristic function or a reliance...

The evolution of cooperation has been the focus of intense research in the social sciences, natural sciences (especially biology), and even computer science. It has long been recognized that the possibility of future consequences is crucial to the emergence of rational cooperation. It was...