We propose an elementary theory of wars fought by fully rational contenders that features three of the main rationalist explanations for armed conflicts: uncertainty, commitment, and indivisibility. Two parties play a Markov game that combines stages of bargaining, where offers are made, with...

Rationalizability is a central concept in game theory. Since there may be many rationalizable strategies, applications commonly use refinements to obtain sharp predictions. In an important paper, Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that no refinement is robust to perturbations of high-order...

Restricting attention to economic environments, we study implementation under perturbed better-response dynamics (BRD). A social choice function (SCF) is implementable in stochastically stable strategies of perturbed BRD whenever the only outcome supported by the stochastically stable strategies...

We define and analyze a "strategic topology'' on types in the Harsanyi-Mertens-Zamir universal type space, where two types are close if their strategic behavior is similar in all strategic situations. For a fixed game and action define the distance between a pair of types as the difference...

This paper proposes the solution concept of interim correlated rationalizability, and shows that all types that have the same hierarchies of beliefs have the same set of interim-correlated-rationalizable outcomes. This solution concept characterizes common certainty of rationality in the...

Weinstein and Yildiz (Econometrica, 2007) have shown that only very weak predictions are robust to mispecifications of higher order beliefs. Whenever a type has multiple rationalizable actions, any of these actions is uniquely rationalizable for some arbitrarily close type. Hence, refinements of...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...

We study large-population repeated games where players are symmetric but not anonymous, so player-specific rewards and punishments are feasible. Players may be commitment types who always take the same action. Even though players are not anonymous, we show that an anti-folk theorem holds when...

We analyze a cheap-talk model in which an informed sender and an uninformed receiver engage in a finite-period communication before the receiver chooses a project. During the communication phase, the sender sends a message in each period, and the receiver then voluntarily pays money for the...

Predictions under common knowledge of payoffs may differ from those under arbitrarily, but finitely, many orders of mutual knowledge; Rubinstein's (1989)Email game is a seminal example. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) showed that the discontinuity in the example generalizes: for all types with...