This note shows that the loss deviations in Selten's (1995) risk dominance measure are the same as the arguments of the probability of a strategy that supports a sequential equilibrium. Risk dominance is used to select among Nash equilibria, while sequential equilibrium, which is stronger than...

Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory -- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past -- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with the...

Truthtelling is often viewed as focal in direct mechanisms. We introduce two new notions of robust implementation based on the premise that society may be composed of "primitive'' agents who, whenever confronted with a strategy profile, anchor to truthtelling and make a limited number of...

What is the role of intuitive versus deliberative cognitive processing in human cooperation? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that (i) intuition favors behaviors that are typically advantageous (i.e. long-run payoff-maximizing), and that for most people cooperation is typically...

Two separate bodies of work have examined whether culture affects cooperation in economic games and whether cooperative or non-cooperative decisions occur more quickly. Here, we connect this work by exploring the relationship between decision time and cooperation in American versus Indian...

We consider abstract exchange mechanisms wherein individuals submit "diversified" offers in m commodities, which are then redistributed to them. Our first result is that if the mechanism satisfies certain natural conditions embodying "fairness" and "convenience" then it admits unique prices, in...

Consider the following "informational robustness" question: what can we say about the set of outcomes that may arise in equilibrium of a Bayesian game if players may observe some additional information? This set of outcomes will correspond to a solution concept that is weaker than equilibrium,...

We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity i for commodity j, for certain ordered pairs ij. Given any connected graph G of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism M_G that satisfies some natural conditions of "fairness" and "convenience."...

Are cooperative decisions typically made more quickly or slowly than non-cooperative decisions? While this question has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most research has focused on one-shot interactions. Yet it is repeated interactions that characterize most important...

Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does “rational” self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic...