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Explore Game Theory
Tokens offer convenience in digital networks and earn rewards when staked for consensus generation or economic activities. In our continuous-time model, agents dynamically allocate wealth over on-platform transactions and staking. Aggregate staking ratio crucially shapes platform productivity, grows...
Crisis bargaining games are widely used to analyze bilateral conflicts, featuring strategic bluffing akin to poker. Players risk substantial losses from overplaying their hand but can secure significant gains if their opponent concedes. Since decisions in crises typically emerge from collective...
Positive assortative matching refers to the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to form partnerships. Measuring the extent to which assortative matching differs between two economies is challenging when the marginal distributions of the characteristic along which sorting takes place...
Author(s) - Antony Millner
This paper investigates a duality between ambiguity averse preferences and the valuation of long run risky assets or public projects. The variational ambiguity model represents preferences over ambiguous acts via a minimization problem, and is fundamentally nonprobabilistic. In contrast, long run...
Just and efficient allocations of charity have attracted much academic and media attention. The sources of inefficiency and unjust are important to understand yet understudied. Our study aims to fill this void by directly modelling the victims market in a collective reputation framework. By...
Author(s) - Joshua S. Gans
This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such situations in...
We use response curves in a repeated game to analyze key aspects of mutual deterrence: escalation, de-escalation, incomplete deterrence, and deterrence by denial. In this approach, episodes of violence are due to interacting response curves, which disincentivize opponents from attacking through both...
Author(s) - Bård Harstad
A simple dynamic game is used for analyzing international environmental problems and climate agreements. Different countries are, over time, emitting as well as investing in green technology. In this framework, we can analyze the business-as-usual outcome, short vs. long term agreements, self...
We conduct an incentivized lab experiment to test participants' ability to understand the DA matching mechanism and the strategyproofness property, conveyed in different ways. We find that while many participants can (using a novel GUI) learn DA's mechanics and calculate its outcomes, such...
We study the volunteers dilemma in environments with heterogeneous preferences and private information. We characterize the efficiency properties of equilibrium, which is a departure from all the previous literature that focuses only on the probability of group success. While the probability of...
September 4, 2024 - Chapter
Author(s) - David R. Agrawal
Inefficiencies from tax competition may result in governments seeking to limit fiscal competition via tax treaties, harmonization, minimum tax rates, or interjurisdictional cooperation. I propose a general model applicable to studying many types of taxing instruments, which allows for the comparison...
We propose a model of the interplay of employment relationships and community-based interactions among workers and managers. Employment relations can be either tough (where workers are monitored intensively and obtain few rents, and managers do not provide informal favors for their workers) or soft...
We study dynamic price competition between sellers offering differentiated products with limited capacity and a common sales deadline. In every period, firms simultaneously set prices, and a randomly arriving buyer decides whether to purchase a product or leave the market. Given remaining capacities...
Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may assess new policies different than the status quo; an...
We examine innovative contexts like scientific research or technical R&D where agents must search across many potential projects of varying and uncertain returns. Is it better to possess incomplete but accurate data on the value of some projects, or might there be cases where it is better to explore...
We analyze a class of dynamic models that has several recent applications, where each period, each firm receives a private shock to the marginal cost of investment and chooses among many ordered capacity levels. Simulation methods to compute these models can result in non-existence of pure strategy...
Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and job...
Industries with significant scale economies or learning-by-doing may come to be dominated by a single firm. Economists have studied how likely this is to happen, and whether it is efficient, using models where buyers are price or quantity takers, even though these industries are often also...
This paper examines the role of technological synergies among heterogeneous firms in business cycle fluctuations. We first document six empirical facts using microdata, revealing strong synergies, positive assortative matching, and their cyclical variations. Next, we embed these synergies into a...
We analyze a coordination game with information-constrained players. The players' actions are based on a noisy compressed representation of the game's payoffs in a particular case, where the compressed representation is a latent state learned by a variational autoencoder (VAE). Our generalized VAE...
How does the presence of risk sharing affect sorting patterns on productive attributes when there are complementarities among partners' skills in match output? We develop a matching model in which risk-averse agents, who differ in skills, match pairwise for productive purposes. Match output has...
Kidney exchange emerges as a pioneering application in the early stages of market design. In contrast to most other successful applications in the field, where design economists primarily serve as consultants to decision-makers, in the context of kidney exchange, they assumed the role of outsider...
Building on theories of international relations, we analyze how mistrust (uncertainty about an adversary's preferences or capabilities), misperception (imperfect observation of an adversary's actions), and misunderstanding (non-degenerate higher-order beliefs) can lead to conflict and drive its...
We propose a new sorting framework: composite sorting. Composite sorting comprises of (1) distinct worker types assigned to the same occupation, and (2) a given worker type simultaneously being part of both positive and negative sorting. Composite sorting arises when fixed investments mitigate...
Author(s) - David R. Agrawal
Inefficiencies from tax competition may result in governments seeking to limit fiscal competition via tax treaties, harmonization, minimum tax rates, or interjurisdictional cooperation. I propose a general model applicable to studying many types of taxing instruments, which allows for the comparison...
This paper introduces a simulation algorithm for evaluating the log-likelihood function of a large supermodular binary-action game. Covered examples include (certain types of) peer effect, technology adoption, strategic network formation, and multi-market entry games. More generally, the algorithm...
We formulate a quantitative dynamic equilibrium theory of trade in the fed funds market, calibrate it to fit a comprehensive set of market-wide and micro-level cross-sectional observations, and use it to make two contributions to the operational side of monetary policy implementation. First, we...
We introduce a novel approach to solving dynamic programming problems, such as those in many economic models, on a quantum annealer, a specialized device that performs combinatorial optimization. Quantum annealers attempt to solve an NP-hard problem by starting in a quantum superposition of all...
The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effects of discounting differentials in...
Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitlers attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohitos government launching a war against the United States, or Putins invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the regime,...
Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the scoring...
We study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a group interest requires costly participation by some fraction of its members. How should we model the internal organization of these groups when there is asymmetric information about the preferences of their members?...
Firms tend to compete more aggressively in financial distress; this intensified competition, in turn, reduces profit margins, pushing themselves further into distress and adversely affecting their industry peers. To study such feedback and contagion effects, we incorporate strategic competition into...
We study the ability of multi-group teams to undertake binary projects in a decentralized environment. The equilibrium outcomes of our model display familiar features in collaborative settings, including inefficient gradualism, inaction, and contribution cycles, wherein groups alternate taking...
We propose a political economy mechanism that explains the presence of fiscal regimes punctuated by crisis periods. Our model focuses on the interaction between successive deficit-biased governments subject to i.i.d. fiscal shocks. We show that the economy transitions between a fiscally responsible...
Observing the increasingly important roles played by the creation and transmission of information and tacit knowledge, we construct an information-network model incorporating both information transmitters and information aggregators. Given information-processing roles in aggregation or transmission,...
Author(s) - Robert A. Pollak
The theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. Because the importance of altruism in the family is widely recognized, the egoism assumption is especially problematic in the economics of the family. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into...
We experimentally study unanimity and majority voting rules in multilateral bargaining environments with stochastic future surplus. In these settings, reaching agreement when expected future surplus is sufficiently higher than the current surplus is inefficient. Theoretically, such inefficiencies...
Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority...
We introduce a model of dynamic pricing in perishable goods markets with competition and provide conditions for equilibrium uniqueness. Pricing dynamics are rich because both own and competitor scarcity affect future profits. We identify new competitive forces that can lead to misallocation due to...
Tax collection by capacity constrained governments may exhibit multiple equilibria: if delinquency is low, limited enforcement capacity is enough to discipline deviators; if delinquency is high, limited enforcement capacity is overstretched and no longer dissuasive. In principle, divide-and-conquer,...
We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regulators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. We emphasize the use of asymptotically safe tests, i.e. tests that are passed...
Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....
Defined contribution (DC) plans are a major vehicle for retirement savings in the US, holding almost $10 trillion in assets under management. In recent years, the quality and availability of these plans has been the subject of active policy attention and of several major lawsuits. This paper studies...
We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics and politics, including a lobbyist seeking to pass a bill, an entrepreneur setting up a start-up, or a firm...
We develop a theoretical model to explain both the high level and persistence in gun violence for black males ages 1524 consistent with the empirical literature. A person may carry a gun for instrumental (i.e., criminal) reasons or for its perceived protective benefit. Discerning underlying motives...
We develop a framework of group corruption via back-door negotiations between an outside initiator and an authority of decision-makers in a hierarchical organization. We examine the role played by the architecture of a multi-tier authority and determine under such a structure how bargaining proceeds...
The attractive properties of the Deferred Acceptance (DA) algorithm rest on the assumption of perfect information. Yet field studies of school matching show that information is imperfect, particularly for disadvantaged students. We model costly strategic learning when schools are ex ante symmetric,...
This Handbook chapter seeks to introduce students and researchers of industrial organization (IO) to the field of market design. We emphasize two important points of connection between the IO and market design fields: a focus on market failuresboth understanding sources of market failure and...
We study dynamic task allocation when providers' expertise evolves endogenously through training. We characterize optimal assignment protocols and compare them to discretionary procedures, where it is the clients who select their service providers. Our results indicate that welfare gains from...
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