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...

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.

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...

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...

In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria based on Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous— time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier by Brown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently been suggested as a...

We identify and investigate the basic `hold-up' problem which arises whenever each party to a contingent contract has to pay some ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a `contractual solution' to this hold-up problem is not...

We investigate the role that self-control problems modeled as time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences and a person's awareness of those problems might play in leading people to develop and maintain harmful addictions. Present-biased preferences create a tendency to over-consume addictive...

The study of evolutionary dynamics was so far mainly restricted to finite strategy spaces. In this paper we show that this restriction is in most cases unnecessary. We give a mild condition under which the continuous time replicator dynamics are well defined for infinite strategy spaces....

This paper builds a model of fragmented duopsony in backward agriculture following Basu and Bell (1991) in which the purchasers (traders) have captive markets each but compete in a contested market. We focus on the formation of captive markets through trader-farmer interlinkage in the form of...