This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision-making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the post war period. The recent books "The World the Game Theorists Made" by Paul Erickson and "How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind" by Paul Erickson,...

This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision-making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the post war period. The recent books The World the Game Theorists Made by Paul Erickson and How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind by Paul Erickson, Judy...

We model strategic competition in a market with asymmetric information as a noncooperative game in which each firm competes for the business of a buyer of unknown type by offering the buyer a catalog of products and prices. The timing in our model is Stackelberg: in the first stage, given the...

In the class of smooth non-cooperative games, exact potential games and weighted potential games are known to admit a convenient characterization in terms of cross-derivatives (Monderer and Shapley, 1996a). However, no analogous characterization is known for ordinal potential games. The present...

Consider any situation involving uncertainty, where the random variable of interest (e.g., payoff) is X. Let there exist a random variable, say Y, which represents the uncertainty intrinsic to the situation, and let there exist a function g such that X=g(Y). Our contention is that, once the...

This paper studies contagious equilibrium in infinitely repeated matching games. The innovation is to identify a key statistic of contagious punishment that, used together with a recursive formulation, generates tractable closed-form expressions for continuation payoffs, off equilibrium. This...

We consider the Nash equilibrium existence problem for Cournotian games and we provide two results for it. The first is compatible with utility functions that are discontinuous at the origin, but requires the nonemptiness of best-replies at the origin (and in some sense is known); the second...

The paper presents a model of world economy with two countries where one of them dubbed home sells the exhaustible resource to final producers in both countries, which compete at the final goods market. The interaction between final producers is reached via the sticky price mechanics, whereas...

We study a preferred equity infusion government program set to mitigate interbank contagion. Financial institutions are prone to insolvency risk channeled through the network of interbank debt and to the risk of bank runs. The government seeks to maximize, under budget constraints, the total net...

We characterize a class of dynamic stochastic games that we call separable dynamic games with noisy transitions and establish that these widely used models are protocol invariant provided that periods are sufficiently short. Protocol invariance means that the set of Markov perfect equilibria is...