It is found that the “Theory of Moves” is adequate in a Cold War scenario, with functionally equal participants, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The destabilization of normal incentive systems, under power and information asymmetry, is what prevents an equilibrium from being reached, as...

The seminal work of Fudenberg and Tirole (1985) on how preemption erodes the value of an option to wait raises general questions about the relation between models in discrete and continuous time and thus about the interpretation of its central result, relying on an "infinitely fine grid". Here...

This paper presents an analytically tractable dynamic game in which players jointly use a resource. The resource replenishes fully but collapses should total use exceed a threshold in any one period. The initial level of use is known to be safe. If it is at all optimal to increase resource use,...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

I study the properties of optimal long-term contracts in an environment in which the agent's type evolves stochastically over time. The model stylizes a buyer-seller relationship but the results apply quite naturally to many contractual situations including regulation and optimal...

Cripps et al. (2005) conjectured that in an infinitely repeated game with two equally patient players, if there is positive probability that the players could be Stackelberg types, then equilibrium behavior would resemble a war of attrition, i.e., a two-sided reputation result would hold. In...

The widespread evidence of multiple bank lending relationships in credit markets suggests that firms are interested in setting up a diversity of banking links. However, it is hard to know from the empirical data whether a firm's observed number of lenders is symptomatic of financial constraints...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule 'imitate-if-better' can hardly be beaten by any strategy. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable in the sense that there is no strategy that can exploit imitation as a...

Human players in our laboratory experiment received flow payoffs over 120 seconds each period from a standard Hawk-Dove bimatrix game played in continuous time. Play converged closely to the symmetric mixed Nash equilibrium under a one-population matching protocol. When the same players were...