This paper studies the core of combined games, obtained by summing two coalitional games. It is shown that the set of balanced transferable utility games can be partitioned into equivalence classes of component games to determine whether the core of the combined game coincides with the sum of...

Selfish, strategic players may benefit from cooperation, provided they reach agreement. It is therefore important to construct mechanisms that facilitate such cooperation, especially in the case of asymmetric private information. The two major issues are: (1) singling out a fair and efficient...

We consider cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), in which we allow for a social structure on the set of players. The social structure is utilized to refine the core of the game. For every coalition the relative strength of a player within that coalition is induced by the...

This paper associates a strategic n-person game with a given transferable utility game and studies its Nash equilibria. Strict equilibria in this model characterize those divisions of social surplus that can become conventions in the sense of Young (1993). It is shown that even in relatively...

We calculate the equilibrium fraction of cooperators in a population in which payoffs accrue from playing a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. Individuals who are hardwired as cooperators or defectors are randomly matched into pairs, and cooperators are able to perfectly find out the type of a...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with four competing strategies: cooperators, defectors, punishing cooperators, and punishing defectors. To explore the robustness of the cooperation-promoting effect of costly punishment, besides the usual strategy adoption...

The Hart-and-Mas-Colell bargaining model [Hart and Mas-Colell (2010). “Bargaining and Cooperation in Strategic Form Games.” Journal of the European Economics Association, 8, 7-33], which is based on strategic form games, is a very promising model possessing many beautiful features....

Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate a cooperative kind of...

We develop a simple model to study the coevolution of interaction structures and action choices in Prisoners' Dilemma games. Agents are boundedly rational and choose both actions and interaction partners via payoff-based imitation. The dynamics of imitation and exclusion yields polymorphic...

This paper studies coalition formation among individuals who differ in productivity. The output of a coalition is determined by the sum of the productivities and the size of the coalition. We consider egalitarian societies in which coalitions split their surplus equally and individualistic...