We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

For games of simultaneous action selection and network formation, game-theoretic behavior and experimental observations are not in line: While theory typically predicts inefficient outcomes for (anti-)coordination games, experiments show that subjects tend to play efficient (non Nash) strategy...

In a framework with an upstream monopoly and a downstream duopoly, we analyze the impact of convex costs on the downstream level. In contrast to the case of constant marginal costs, vertical integration does not imply complete market foreclosure. While the non-integrated downstream firm receives...

A strategy is obviously dominant if, for any deviation, at any information set where both strategies first diverge, the best outcome under the deviation is no better than the worst outcome under the dominant strategy. A mechanism is obviously strategy-proof (OSP) if it has an equilibrium in...

This paper develops a strategic model of procrastination in which present-biased agents prefer to do an onerous task in the company of someone else. This turns their decision of when to do the task into a procrastination game { a dynamic coordination game between present-biased players. The...

In repeated normal-form (simultaneous-move) games, simple penal codes (Abreu,1986, 1988) permit an elegant characterization of the set of subgame-perfect outcomes. We show that the logic of simple penal codes fails in repeated extensive-form games. By means of examples, we identify two types of...

To analyze strategic interaction which may induce externalities, we designed Bathroom Games with frequency-dependent stage payoffs. Two people regularly use a bathroom, before leaving they can either clean up the mess made, or not. Cleaning up involves an effort, so this option always gives a...

We study strategic negotiation models featuring costless delay, general recognition procedures, endogenous voting orders, and finite sets of alternatives. Two examples show: 1. non-existence of stationary subgame-perfect equilibrium (SSPE). 2. the recursive equations and optimality conditions...

It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with finitely many firms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome (Vega-Redondo, 1997). However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in...

We define the logit dynamic for games with continuous strategy spaces and establish its fundamental properties, i.e. the existence, uniqueness and continuity of solutions. We apply the dynamic to the analysis of the Burdett and Judd (1983) model of price dispersion. Our objective is to assess...