Can people be relied upon to be nice to each other? Thomas Hobbes famously did not think so, but his view that rational cooperation does not require that people be nice has never been popular. The debate has continued to simmer since Joseph Butler took up the Hobbist gauntlet in 1725. This...

This is a contribution to the growing experimental literature on how trial-and-error adjustment processes can establish a convention for coordination on an equilibrium in a game. A simple bargaining game introduced by Nash is used for this purpose. Subjects are conditioned in different...

In Game Theory and the Social Contract, Ken Binmore argues that game theory provides a systematic tool for investigating ethical matters. His reinterpretation of classical social contract ideas within a game-theoretic framework generates new insights into the fundamental questions of social...

This volume brings together all of Ken Binmore's influential experimental papers on bargaining along with newly written commentary in which Binmore discusses the underlying game theory and addresses the criticism leveled at it by behavioral economists. When Binmore began his experimental work in...

In Volume 1 of Game Theory and the Social Contract, Ken Binmore restated the problems of moral and political philosophy in the language of game theory. In Volume 2, Just Playing, he unveils his own controversial theory, which abandons the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant for the naturalistic...

This lecture is a brief overview of an evolutionary theory of fairness. The ideasare fleshed out in a book Natural Justice, which is itself a condensed versionof an earlier two-volume book Game Theory and the Social Contract (Binmore[14, 12, 13])...