We define a differential game of public investment with a discontinuous Markovian strategy space. The best response correspondence for the game is well-behaved: a best response exists and uniquely maps almost all profiles of opponents’ strategies back to the strategy space. Our chosen strategy...

We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another’s intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from...

We use a unique hand collected data set of 6 258 auctions from the online football manager game Hattrick to study micro-patterns of reserve price formation. We find that chosen reserve prices exhibit both, very sophisticated and irrational" behavior by the sellers. Reserve prices pick up the...

This paper analyzes a two-stage sealed-bid auction that is frequently employed in privatization, takeover, and merger and acquisition contests. This auction format yields the same expected revenue as the open ascending (English) auction, yet is less susceptible to preemptive bidding and collusion.

We characterise the entire set of symmetric stationary Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPE) in a differential game of public good investment, using the canonical problem of climate change as an example. We provide a sufficient and necessary condition for MPE and show how the entire set of MPE is...

A large literature in behavioral economics has emphasized in the last decades the role of individual differences in social preferences (such as trust and altruism) and in influencing behavior in strategic environments. Here we emphasize the role of attention and working memory, and show that...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

The mathematical framework of psychological game theory is useful for describing many forms of motivation where preferences depend directly on own or others' beliefs. It allows for incorporating, e.g., emotions, reciprocity, image concerns, and self-esteem in economic analysis. We explain how...

We study bribing in a sequential team contest with multiple pairwise battles. We allow for asymmetries in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort; and we characterize the conditions under which (i) a player in a team is offered a bribe by the owner of the other team and (ii) she accepts the...

This paper proposes a comprehensive perspective on the question of self-enforcing solutions for normal form games. While this question has been widely discussed in the literature, the focus is usually either on strict incentives for players to stay within the proposed solution or on strategic...