Morgan (2000) has shown that lotteries are potentially an effective mechanism for the provision of public goods. In particular, he has shown that lotteries lead to a level of provision above the level provided by the voluntary contributions mechanism. In this paper, we analyze the effect of...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

Some results in the monotone comparative statics literature tell us that if a parameter increases, some old equilibria are smaller than some new equilibria. We give a sufficient condition such that at a new parameter value every old equilibrium is smaller than every new equilibrium. We also...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...

We examine a new class of games, which we call social games, where players not only choose strategies but also choose with whom they play. A group of players who are dissatisfied with the play of their current partners can join together and play a new equilibrium. This imposes new refinements on...

We construct an uncoupled randomized strategy of repeated play such that, if every player follows such a strategy, then the joint mixed strategy profiles converge, almost surely, to a Nash equilibrium of the one-shot game. The procedure requires very little in terms of players' information about...

An extensively studied model of public goods provision implies that government donations to charity crowd out private donations dollar-for-dollar. Field studies fail to verify this result. Several analysts argue that the problem lies with the specification of donor preferences. We report on a...

This paper studies two classes of two-person zero-sum games in which the strategies of both players are of a special type.Each strategy can be split into two parts, a taking and a guessing part.In these games two types of asymmetry between the players can occur.In the first place, the number of...

This paper extends the concepts of proper equilibria, protective behaviour and prudent behaviour to multicriteria games. Three types of proper equilibria based on different types of domination are introduced. It is shown that protective behaviour coincides with prudent behaviour. Possible...

This paper describes simple contract-theoretical settings where the parties optimally choose to stipulate unverifiable or unenforceable contracts. The only manner to achieve the first-best is to stipulate a roundabout contract that explicitly prohibits the optimal outcome, while secretly...