Is conformity amongst similar individuals consistent with self-interested behavior? We consider a model of incomplete information in which each player receives a signal, interpreted as an allocation to a role, and can make his action choice conditional on his role. Our main result demonstrates...

Treating games of incomplete information with countable sets of actions and types and finite but large player sets we demonstrate that for every mixed strategy profile there is a pure strategy profile that is 'epsilon-equivalent'. Our framework introduces and exploits a distinction between...

In a classic model of tax competition, we show that the level of public good provision and taxation in a decentralized equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much, or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the...

Modeling club structures as bipartite networks, we formulate the problem of club formation as a game of network formation and identify those club networks that are stable if agents behave farsightedly in choosing their club memberships. Using the farsighted core as our stability notion, we show...

Sections 8(a)(3) and 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act prohibit a firm from unilaterally increasing the wage it pays the union during the negotiation of a new wage contract. To understand this regulation, we study a counterfactual model where the firm can unilaterally increase wages...

We present a dynamic model of club formation in a society of identical people. Coalitions consisting of members of the same club can form for one period and coalition members can jointly deviate. The dynamic process is described by a Markov chain defined by myopic optimization on the part of...

We introduce a perfect price discriminating (PPD) mechanism for allocation problems with private information. A PPD mechanism treats a seller, for example, as a perfect price discriminating monopolist who faces a price schedule that does not depend on her report. In any PPD mechanism, every...

We make four main contributions to the theory of network formation. (1) The problem of network formation with farsighted agents can be formulated as an abstract network formation game. (2) In any farsighted network formation game the feasible set of networks contains a unique, finite, disjoint...

We explore the potential for correlated equilibrium to capture conformity to norms and the coordination of behavior within social groups. Given a partition of players into social groups we propose three properties one may expect of a correlated equilibrium: within-group anonymity, group...

This paper studies a class of dynamic games, called repeated games with asynchronous moves, where not all players may revise their actions in every period. With state-dependent backwards induction, we introduce the concept of effective minimax in repeated games with asynchronous moves. A...