The central concept of noncooperative game theory is that of the \emph{strategic equilibrium} (or Nash equilibrium, or noncooperative equilibrium). In this chapter we discuss some of the conceptual issues surrounding this concept and its refinements. Many of these issues have received increasing...

Population games are stochastic processes which explicitly model Nash's (1950) mass action interpretation of Nash equilibrium. The mass action interpretation envisions a population of players for each position in the game, and that players are randomly matched for play. The hope is that the...

This paper presents a model of individual behavior in minimum effort coordination games, focusing primarily on the effects of the number of players and the introduction of inter-group competition. It is shown that independent of the number of players and the number of competing groups, the most...

While many learning models have been proposed in the game theoretic literature to track individuals’ behavior, surprisingly little research has focused on how well these models describe human adaptation in changing dynamic environments. Analysis of human behavior demonstrates that people are...

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...

If, in international agreements, governments “link'' trade to environmental policy (or other issues with non-pecuniary externalities), will this promote more cooperation in both policies or will cooperation in one policy be strengthened at the expense of the other? We analyze this question in...

We experimentally test whether a class of monetary policy decision rules describes decision making in a population of inexperienced central bankers. In our experiments, subjects repeatedly set the short-term interest rate for a computer economy with inflation as their target. A large majority of...

We examine a new class of games, which we call social games, where players not only choose strategies but also choose with whom they play. A group of players who are dissatisfied with the play of their current partners can join together and play a new equilibrium. This imposes new refinements on...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

We show that, in repeated common interest games without discounting, strong `perturbation implies efficiency' results require that the perturbations must include strategies which are `draconian' in the sense that they are prepared to punish to the maximum extent possible. Moreover, there is a...