This paper develops a framework for empirically testing several alternative game-theoretic rationales for Horn’s rule. It then presents an economic laboratory experiment where these rationales are empirically tested. Subjects seem to coordinate on Horn’s rule where efficiency acts...

The literature on the electronic mail game shows that players’ mutual expectations may lock them into requiring an inefficiently large number of confirmations and confirmations of confirmations from one another. This paper shows that this result hinges on the assumption that, with the...

In the two-way flow connections model of the seminal paper by Bala and Goyal (2000a), the marginal benefit of obtaining the information of one more player is constant. However, it is plausible that the marginal benefit of such information is decreasing. This paper explores the consequences for...

Economists usually describe goods as being either (gross) complements or (gross) substitutes. Yet, what is less known is that one good may be a gross substitute for a second good, while the second good is a gross complement to the first good. This paper shows the existence of asymmetric gross...

As shown by Rubinstein (1989, AER), in the two-player electronic mail game, players are better off if the extent to which they can check each other’s information, check each other’s information about each other’s information, etc., is limited. This paper investigates to what...

The set of equilibrium networks in the two-way flow model of network formation (Bala and Goyal, 2000) is very sensitive to the introduction of decay. Even if decay is small enough so that equilibrium networks are minimal, the set of equilibrium architectures becomes much richer, especially when...

In a two-player stag hunt with asymmetric information, players may lock each other into requiring a large number of confirmations and confirmations of confirmations from one another before eventually acting. This intuition has been formalized in the electronic mail game (EMG). The literature...

This paper considers a multi-player stag hunt where players are either available for action or not, and where players additionally differ in their degree of conservatism, i.e. in the threshold of players that need to act along with them before they see benefits in collective action. Minimal...

This paper characterizes the set of equilibrium networks in the two-way flow model of network formation with small decay, and this for all increasing benefit functions of the players. We show that as long as the population is large enough, this set contains large- as well as small-diameter...