It has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental representations of interactive decision problems (Kreps, 1990). We submit that the relational structure of players' preferences in a game induces cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such...

In this paper, we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source, and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric, thus extending the well-studied problem of minimum cost spanning...

Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs. In this paper, we find an optimal mechanism to allocate goods...

The set of all Bayesian–Nash equilibrium payoffs that the players can achieve by making conditional commitments at the interim stage of a Bayesian game coincides with the set of all feasible, incentive compatible and interim individually rational payoffs of the Bayesian game. Furthermore, the...

We analyze a simultaneous ascending auction with anonymous item prices, for two items that are substitutes. This popular format entails increased opportunities for coordination among bidders, since bids are observable and can be used as signaling. This has happened, e.g., in the Netherlands 3G...

We study whether allowing players to sign binding contracts governing future play leads to reputation effects in repeated games with long-run players. We proceed by extending the analysis of Abreu and Pearce (2007) by allowing for the possibility that different behavioral types may not be...

The literature on ascending combinatorial auctions yields conflicting insights regarding the possibility to implement the Vickrey payoffs for general valuations. We introduce the class of minimal ascending auctions, a class which allows one to disconnect the final payments from the final bids...

In games with strategic substitutes (GSS), convergence of the best-response dynamic starting from the inf (or sup) of the strategy space is equivalent to global stability (convergence of every adaptive dynamic to the same pure strategy Nash equilibrium). Consequently, in GSS, global stability...

We describe the construction and analysis of asymmetric Cost Sharing mechanisms, in which a variety of axioms are applied to subsets of the agents/goods. We show that the analysis can be quite subtle as apparently similar axiomatizations lead to significantly different results; in particular,...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority...