We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for $k$ periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period; one vote is...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

This paper examines optimal social linkage when each individual's repeated interaction with each of his neighbors creates spillovers. Individuals differ across rates of time preference. A planner must choose a local interaction system or neighborhood design before observing the realization of...

We exhibit and characterize an entire class of simple adaptive strategies, in the repeated play of a game, having the Hannan- consistency property: In the long-run, the player is guaranteed an average payoff as large as the best-reply payoff to the empirical distribution of play of the other...

The backward induction (or subgame-perfect) equilibrium of a perfect information game is shown to be the unique evolutionarily stable outcome for dynamic models consisting of selection and mutation, when the mutation rate is low and the populations are large.

It is shown here that market crashes and bubbles can arise without external shocks. Sudden changes in behavior coming after a long period of stationarity may be the result of endogenous information processing. Except for the daily observation of the market, there is no new information, no...

Modica and Rustichini [Theory and Decision 37, 1994] provided a logic for reasoning about knowledge where agents may be unaware of certain propositions. However, their original approach had the unpleasant property that nontrivial unawareness was incompatible with partitional information...

We propose a novel approach to modelling time preferences, based on a cognitive shortcoming of human decision makers: the perception of future events becomes increasingly `blurred' as the events are pushed further in time. Our model explains behavioural `anomalies' such as preference reversals...

Aumann has proved that common knowledge of substantive rationality implies the backwards induction solution in games of perfect information. Stalnaker has proved that it does not. Roughly speaking, a player is substantively rational if, for all vertices $v$, if the player were to reach vertex...

Given a finite game with common payoffs (i.e. the players have completely common interests), we show that the problem of determining whether there exists a joint strategy where each player nets at least k is NP-complete.