We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

Maintaining the security of critical infrastructure networks is vital for a modern economy. This paper examines a game-theoretic model of attack and defense of a network in which the defender's objective is to maintain network connectivity and the attacker's objective is to destroy a set of...

Theoretical and experimental studies of noncooperative games increasingly recognize Nash equilibrium as a limiting outcome of players repeated interaction. This note, while sharing that view, illustrates and advocates combined use of convex optimization and differential equations, the purpose...

Tipping of a natural system, entailing a loss of ecosystem services, may be prevented by stable partial cooperation. The presence of tipping points reverses the grim story that a high level of cooperation is hard to achieve and leaves large possible gains of cooperation. We investigate a tipping...

I consider a contest in which the quantity of output is rewarded and another in which the quality of output is rewarded. The output in the quality contest plays a dual role. It counts in the quality contest but it is also converted into quantity-equivalent output to obtain total output in the...

The purpose of this paper is to model the influence of Kantian moral scruples in a dynamic environment. Our objectives are two-fold. Firstly, we investigate how a Nash equilibrium among agents who have moral scruples may ensure that the exploitation of a common property renewable resource is...

This paper examines the usefulness of Kalai (2020)'s measure of the viability of Nash equilibrium. We experimentally study a class of participation games, which differ in the number of players, the success threshold, and the payoff to not participating. We find that Kalai's measure captures well...

This paper characterizes geometrically the set of all Nash equilibrium payoffs achievable with unmediated communication in persuasion games, i.e., games with an informed expert and an uninformed decisionmaker in which the expert's information is certifiable. The first equilibrium...

Using the aggregative game approach as developed by Cornes and Hartley (2003, 2007) this paper analyzes the conditions under which matching mechanisms in a public good economy lead to interior matching equilibria in which all agents make strictly positive flat contributions to the public good....