Nash is famous for many inventions, but it is less known that he, simultaneously with Marschak, also was the first to axiomatize expected utility for risk. In particular, these authors were the first to state the independence condition, a condition that should have been but was not stated by von...

This paper examines the conception of individuals as being of certain types in Harsanyi'stransformation of games of incomplete information into games of complete information. Itargues that while the conception of the individual in games of complete information offerspotential advances over the...

This paper offers a resolution to an extensively studied question in theoretical economics: which measure spaces are suitable for modeling many economic agents? We propose the condition of 'nowhere equivalence' to characterize those measure spaces that can be effectively used to model the space...

We argue in favor of a departure from the standard equilibrium approach in game theory in favor of the less ambitious goal of describing only the actual behavior of rational players. We investigate the notion of rationality in behavioral models of extensive-form games (allowing for imperfect...

In economics, the standard approach to language is that talk is cheap. Here, instead, language is a social convention that affects utility. Unless language is used in its ordinary sense, it cannot help to coordinate actions because there is no way of decoding it. This points to a unique...

A Nash equilibrium can also be seen as a Cournot-Nash equilibrium, though this is debated because Cournot provided a specific application, not a general formulation. In my view, another of Nash's fundamental contributions stands out when contrasting him to Cournot. Cournot treated economic...

This paper examines the conception of individuals as being of certain types in Harsanyi'stransformation of games of incomplete information into games of complete information. Itargues that while the conception of the individual in games of complete information offerspotential advances over the...

The alternating offers game due to Rubinstein (1982) had been used by Binmore (1980) and by Binmore et.al. (1986) to provide via its unique subgame perfect equilibrium an approximate non-cooperative support for the Nash bargaining solution of associated cooperative two-person bargaining games....