This study characterizes the corporate leniency policy that minimizes the frequency with which collusion occurs. Though it can be optimal to provide only partial leniency, plausible sufficient conditions are provided whereby the antitrust authority should waive all penalties for the first firm...

Although there exist learning processes for which the empirical distribution of play comes close to Nash equilibrium it is an open question whether the players themselves can learn to play equilibrium strategies without assuming that they have prior knowledge of their opponents' strategies...

The common characteristic of R&D joint ventures between oligopolistic competitors, arms reduction talks, and study groups in law school is cooperation with rivals. Players benefit from cooperation, but any gain by their partner weakens their own position when competing for profits, security, or...

The ability to accurately evaluate an employee would seem to be a key activity in managing Information Technology (IT). Yet, workers may engage in dishonest and misleading behavior, which distort the evaluation, a variation of organizational politics. Why would they do so? One hypothesis is that...

In a number of large, important families of finite games, not only do pure-strategy Nash equilibria always exist but they are also reachable from any initial strategy profile by some sequence of myopic single-player moves to a better or best-response strategy. This weak acyclicity property is...

The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our...

It is well known that non-renegotiable contracts with third parties may have an effect on the outcome of a strategic interaction and thus serve as a commitment device. We address this issue when contracts are renegotiable. More precisely, we analyze the equilibrium outcomes of twostage games...

We study a structural model of R&D alliance networks in which firms jointly form R&D collaborations to lower their production costs while competing on the product market. We derive the Nash equilibrium of this game, provide a welfare analysis and determine the optimal R&D subsidy program that...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...