The article shows how Jean-Francois Mertens contributed to the development of game theory and microeconomics as we know them today. Along with about 80 articles, Mertens's topics go from the formulation of Bayesian decision making in games with incomplete information to the foundations of cost...

This study investigates the relationship between an actor’s beliefs about others’ other-regarding (social) preferences and her own other-regarding preferences, using an<em> “avant-garde”</em> hierarchical Bayesian method. We estimate two distributional other-regarding preference parameters, α...

We experimentally investigate whether human subjects are willing to give up individual freedom in return for the benefits of improved coordination. We conduct a modified iterated public goods game in which subjects in each period first decide which of two groups to join. One group employs a...

This paper analyzes optimal contracts in a linear hidden-action model with normally distributed returns possessing two moments that are governed jointly by two agents who have negative exponential utilities. They can observe and verify each others’ effort levels and draft enforceable...

This paper attacks a problem like the one addressed in an earlier work (Potthoff, 2013) but is more mathematical. The setting is one where an election is to choose a single winner from <i>m</i> ( 2) candidates, it is postulated that voters have knowledge of the preference profile of the electorate, and...

Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms are willing to make early...

The relationship between risk in the environment, risk aversion and inequality aversion is not well understood. Theories of fairness have typically assumed that pie sizes are known ex-ante. Pie sizes are, however, rarely known ex ante. Using two simple allocation problems—the Dictator and...

The finitely repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma is a good illustration of the discrepancy between the strategic behaviour suggested by a game-theoretic analysis and the behaviour often observed among human players, where cooperation is maintained through most of the game. A game-theoretic reasoning...

The editors of <i>Games</i> would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2013. [...]

The literature on social norms has often stressed that social disapproval is crucial to foster compliance with norms and promote fair and cooperative behavior. With this in mind, we explore the disapproval of allocation decisions using experimental data from five dictator games with a feedback...