Game harmony is a generic game property that describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs. It can be used to predict cooperation in two-player games. We show how, for large enough positive harmony...

It is common to model costs of carrying out strategies in games in relation to the complexity, in some sense, of the strategies. We show a particularly general definition of complexity for this purpose, one that subsumes many alternatives as special cases. We explore how this definition can be...

A person is said to be `trust responsive` if she fulfils trust because she believes the truster trusts her. The experiment we report was designed to test for trust responsiveness and its robustness across payoff structures, and to disentangle it from other possible factors making for...

The standard model of an extensive form game rules out an important phenomenon in situations of strategic interaction: deception. Using examples from the world of ancient Greece and from modern-day Wall Street, we show how the model can be generalized to incorporate this phenomenon. Deception...

This paper presents a pairwise matching model with two-sided information asymmetry to analyse the impact of information costs on endogenous network building and matching by information intermedairies. The framework innovates by examining the role of information costs on incentives for trade...

The paper develops a model of decentralized metering decisions when selective metering is socially optimal. Households choose between two-part tariffs. Decentralization achieves social efficiency when the regulator, who knows household characteristics, gives household-specific compensation (via...

Probably the most enduring result in the theory of optimum income taxation is that, for a sufficiently thin upper tail to the skill distribution, the marginal tax rate should fall rather than rise with income. This paper shows that this result is highly sensitive to a very strong informational...

This paper extends the relational contract model in Levin (2003) with shocks to theagent’s cost of effort (agent’s type) to shocks to the principal’s valuation of the agent’seffort (principal’s type). When optimal effort is fully pooled across agent types...

This paper studies a marriage market with two-sided information asymmetry in whichthe gains from marriage are stochastic. Contracts specify divisions of ex-post realizedmarital surplus. I first study a game in which one side of the matching market offerscontracts. I show that when expected...

Internet commerce has made it easier to compare prices and shop online.  However, it has also exposed consumers to a new kind of crime in the form of the electronic theft of payment details.  However the skills required to successfully intercept payment data differ from the skills required to...