We consider a signaling model where adults possess information about the dominant social norm. Children want to conform to whatever norm is dominant but, lacking accurate information, take the observed behavior of their parent as representative. We show that this causes a signaling distortion in adult behavior, even in the absence of conflicts of interest. Parents adopt attitudes that encourage their children to behave in a socially safe way, i.e. the way that would be optimal under maximum uncertainty about the prevailing social norm. We discuss applications to sexual attitudes, collective reputation, and trust.

This study considers evolutionary games with non-uniformly random matching when interaction occurs in groups of n≥2 individuals using pure strategies from a finite strategy set. In such models, groups with different compositions of individuals generally co-exist and the reproductive success (fitness) of a specific strategy varies with the frequencies of different group types. These frequencies crucially depend on the matching process. For arbitrary matching processes (called matching rules), we study Nash equilibrium and ESS in the associated population game and show that several results that are known to hold for population games under uniform random matching carry through to our setting. In our most novel contribution, we derive results on the efficiency of the Nash equilibria of population games and show that for any (fixed) payoff structure, there always exists some matching rule leading to average fitness maximization. Finally, we provide a series of applications to commonly studied normal-form games.

Distributional comparative statics is the study of how individual decisions and equilibrium outcomes vary with changes in the distribution of economic parameters (income, wealth, productivity, information, etc.). This article develops new tools to address such issues and illustrates their usefulness in applications. The central development is a condition called quasi-concave differences, which implies concavity of the policy function in optimization problems without imposing differentiability or quasi-concavity conditions. The general take-away is that many distributional questions in economics which cannot be solved by direct calculations or the implicit function theorem, can be addressed easily with this article’s methods. Several applications demonstrate this: the article shows how increased uncertainty affects the set of equilibria in Bayesian games; it shows how increased dispersion of productivities affects output in the model of Melitz (2003); and it generalizes Carroll and Kimball (1996)’s result on concave consumption functions to the Aiyagari (1994) setting with borrowing constraints.

The first volume of this wide-ranging Handbook contains original contributions by world-class specialists. It provides up-to-date surveys of the main game-theoretic tools commonly used to model industrial organization topics. The Handbook covers numerous subjects in detail including, among others, the tools of lattice programming, supermodular and aggregative games, monopolistic competition, horizontal and vertically differentiated good models, dynamic and Stackelberg games, entry games, evolutionary games with adaptive players, asymmetric information, moral hazard, learning and information sharing models.

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous `disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under unanimity rule, equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values. Under all less-than-unanimity rules, expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values. We conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule, finding qualitative support for several, but not all, of our main predictions. Having a high disagreement value is indeed an advantage under unanimity. Under majority, the player with the highest disagreement value is more likely to be excluded, but this does not consistently result in a lower average payoff.

We investigate the limits of communication and leadership in avoiding coordination failure in minimum effort games. Our environment is challenging, with low benefits of coordination relative to the effort cost. We consider two leader types: cheap-talk leader-communicators who suggest an effort level, and first-mover leaders who lead by example. Both types of leadership have some ability to increase effort in groups with no history, but are insufficient in groups with a history of low effort. Using the strategy method for followers’ responses, we attribute the persistence of coordination failure to the presence of followers who do not follow the leader.

Using belief elicitation, the paper investigates the process of belief formation and evolution in a signaling game in which a common prior is not induced. Both prior and posterior beliefs of Receivers about Senders' types are elicited, as well as beliefs of Senders about Receivers' strategies. In the experiment, subjects often start with diffuse uniform beliefs and update them in view of observations. However, the speed of updating is influenced by the strength of initial beliefs. An interesting result is that beliefs about the prior distribution of types are updated slower than posterior beliefs, which incorporate Senders' strategies. In the medium run, for some specifications of game parameters, this leads to outcomes being significantly different from the outcomes of the game in which a common prior is induced. It is also shown that elicitation of beliefs does not considerably change the pattern of play in this game.

We study the problem of evaluating whether the selection from a set is close to the ordering of the set determined by an exogenously given measure. Our main result is that three axioms, two naturally capturing “dominance”, and a stronger one imposing a form of symmetry in the comparison of selections, are sufficient to evaluate how close any selection from any set is to the given ordering of the set. This closeness is given by a very simple index, which is a linear function of the sum of the ranks of the selected elements. The paper ends by relating this index to the existing literature on distance between orderings, and also offers a practical application of the index.

The paper argues that systemic risk must be taken into account when designing optimal bankruptcy procedures in general, and priority rules in particular. Allowing for endogenous formation of links in the interbank market we show that the optimal policy depends on the distribution of shocks and the severity of fire sales.

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial institutions can trigger political transitions which would not otherwise have taken place. We test this unexplored implication of the theory empirically. We find that the anticipation of receiving new loan programs immediately after a political regime transition increases the probability of a transition from autocracy to democracy and reduces the probability of democratic survival.