We introduce a framework for modeling pairwise interactive beliefs and provide an epistemic foundation for Nash equilibrium in terms of pairwise epistemic conditions locally imposed on only some pairs of players. Our main result considerably weakens not only the standard sufficient conditions by...

In many economic situations, a player pursues coordination or anti-coordination with her neighbors on a network, but she also has intrinsic preferences among the available options. We here introduce a model which allows to analyze this issue by means of a simple framework in which players...

This paper introduces asymmetric awareness into the classical principal–agent model and discusses the optimal contract between a fully aware principal and an unaware agent. The principal enlarges the agentʼs awareness strategically when proposing a contract and faces a tradeoff between...

This paper studies the evolution of peoplesʼ models of how other people think – their theories of mind. This is formalized within the level-k model, which postulates a hierarchy of types, such that type k plays a k times iterated best response to the uniform distribution. It is found that,...

Reputations often guide sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider situations where each player is randomly matched with a partner in every period. One player – the truster – decides whether to trust. If trusted, the other player – the temptee – has a temptation to...

We examine a model of limited communication in which the seller is selling a single good to two potential buyers. In each of the finite number of periods the seller asks one of the two buyers a binary question. After the final answer, the allocation and the transfers are executed. The model...

We study learning with bounded memory in zero-sum repeated games with one-sided incomplete information. The uninformed player has only a fixed number of memory states available. His strategy is to choose a transition rule from state to state, and an action rule, which is a map from each memory...

A growing literature analyzes revenue-maximizing contracts for situations in which agents can acquire private information before they decide whether to join the contract. It is conjectured that the results also apply to the more natural scenario where information can be acquired either before or...

In the presence of self-interested parties, mechanism designers typically aim to implement some social-choice function in an equilibrium. This paper studies the cost of such equilibrium requirements in terms of communication. While a certain amount of information x needs to be communicated just...

We experimentally assess the predictive power of two equilibrium selection principles for binary N-player entry games with strategic complementarities. In static entry games, we test the theory of global games which posits that players play games of complete information as if they were playing a...