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...

We study adaptation to climate change in a federalist setting. To protect themselves against an increase in flood risk, regional governments choose among adaptation measures that vary with respect to their costs, the level of protection they offer, and the presence and nature of spillovers to...

Frustration, anger, and aggression have important consequences for economic and social behavior, concerning for example monopoly pricing, contracting, bargaining, traffic safety, violence, and politics. Drawing on insights from psychology, we develop a formal approach to exploring 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...

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...

Extending the power-to-take game, we explore the impact of two forces that may shape retaliation. In our 2x2 design, i) in addition to taking, the proposers can give part of their endowment to the responders, and ii) in addition to destroying their own endowment in retaliation, the responders...

Altruists and envious people who meet in contests are symbionts. They do better than a population of narrowly rational individuals. If there are only altruists and envious individuals, a particular mixture of altruists and envious individuals is evolutionarily stable.

This paper explores the reluctance of men (women) to acknowledge or recognise the work, comments, and claims of new ideas by other men (women) via widespread and intense demonstrations of indifference. Instances like desk rejections by journals by not allowing papers to reach a review stage,...

This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of "multi-directedness," whereby people's preferences depend on their psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives....

This paper investigates optimal contest design when the designer s payoff is increasing in competitive balance between contestants. A two-player contest with asymmetric effort costs (asymmetric abilities) is considered. Competitive balance is measured by the difference in winning probabilities...