This paper considers two games, a stag hunt and a prisoners' dilemma. Each game features non-binding, costless, and free-form pre-play communication. I focus on players who verbally first suggest cooperation in each game. I study experimentally whether the frequency of verbal initiative-taking...

Introduction to Strategic Form Games -- Dominance -- Rationalizability -- Nash Equilibrium -- Perfect Equilibrium -- Evolutionary Stable Strategies -- Correlated Equilibrium -- Bayesian Nash Equilibrium -- Introduction to Extensive Form Games -- Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium -- Sequential...

Monetary theorists have advanced an intriguing notion: we exchange money to make up for a lack of enforcement, when it is difficult to monitor and sanction opportunistic behaviors. We demonstrate that, in fact, monetary equilibrium cannot generally be sustained when monitoring and punishment...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

This article describes the basic elements of the cooperative approach to game theory, one of the two counterparts of the discipline. After the presentation of some basic definitions, the focus will be on the core and the Shapley value, two of the most central solution concepts in cooperative...

We explore the determinants of the payoffs an individual player may obtain in the equilibria of superadditive n-player coalitional games with transferable payoff. We provide conditions necessary and sufficient for the lower bound on a player's equilibrium payoff to coincide with his reservation...

This paper presents a new cooperative equilibrium for strategic form games, denoted Conjectural Cooperative Equilibrium (CCE). This concept is based on the expectation that joint deviations from any strategy profile are followed by an optimal and noncooperative reaction of non deviators. We show...

The paper explores organizations designed to influence a group to choose specific alternatives from a set of possible choices. The perspective is that of an administrator that has personal objectives not shared by the group and can dictate organization but not group choice. The design works...

The siting of noxious facilities is usually a reason for conflict: as a society we want them, but as individuals (and often as communities) we do not want them close by. Faced with this problem, economists have used several methods such as lotteries, auctions or insurance policies. However, all...