We consider cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), in which we allow for a social structure on the set of players. The social structure is utilized to refine the core of the game. For every coalition the relative strength of a player within that coalition is induced by the...

Most of the conflict theory papers have used a one-shot game set-up. This does not correspond to reality and is certainly incapable of modeling real conflict situations. We propose a dynamic model with N-agents in an infinite time frame which allow us to adequately analyze conflicts. The dynamic...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest — which we call a ‘tax lottery' —...

Rational choice presupposes that people do what they like better than any available alternative. If, however, we mistrust what they declare to like or what psychology is supposed to tell us about it (a pardonable enough mistrust), we can only infer what they like from observing what they do. We...

It has long been established in the literature that the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria of any binary game of strategic complements among a set N of players can be seen as a lattice on the set of all subsets of N under the partial order defined by the set inclusion relation (⊆). If the...

We study the role of information exchange, leadership and coordination in team or partnership structures. For this purpose, we view individuals jointly engaging in productive processes — a ‘team' — as endowed with individual and privately held information on the joint production process....

Understanding human cooperation is of major interest across the natural and social sciences. But it is unclear to what extent cooperation is actually a general concept. Most research on cooperation has implicitly assumed that a person's behavior in one cooperative context is related to their...

Collusion has long been the Achilles heel of mechanism design, as most results break down when participating agents can collude. The issue is more severe when monetary transfers (bribes) between agents are feasible, wherein it is known that truthful revelation and efficient allocation are...

I define constrained efficient direct mechanisms as those that are not Pareto dominated within the set of direct mechanisms that satisfy some given feasibility constraints – incentive compatibility and other constraints. I show a standard equivalence with maximization of a social welfare...

To derive predictions from economic theory, the literature conventionally proceeds by studying, or ‘solving’, said theory through the lens of a solution concept (e.g. Nash equilibrium). In this paper, we argue that theoretical predictions are more suitably derived from an explicit set of...