This paper addresses the following issue: If a set of agents bargain on a set of feasible alternatives ’under the shadow’ of a voting rule, that is, any agreement can be enforced if a ’winning coalition’ supports it, which general agreements are likely to arise? In other terms: Which is the influence that the voting rule used to settle agreements can project on the outcome? To give an answer we...

We consider a committee facing a binary decision under uncertainty. Each member holds some private information. Members may have different preferences and initial beliefs, but they all agree which decision should be taken in each of the two states of the world. We characterize the optimal anonymous and deterministic voting rule and provide a homogeneity assumption on preferences and beliefs und...

In this paper we consider the Minimum Cost Spanning Tree model. We assume that a central planner aims at implementing a minimum cost spanning tree not knowing the true link costs. The central planner sets up a game where agents announce link costs, a tree is chosen and costs are allocated according to the rules of the game. We characterize ways of allocating costs such that true announcements c...

It is widely believed that the value of acquiring a slot in a sponsored search list (that comes along with the organic links in a search engine’s result page) highly depends on who else is shown in the other sponsored positions. To capture such externality effects, we consider a model of keyword advertising where bidders participate in a Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction and users perform ...

In a game of common interest there is one action vector that all players prefer to every other. Yet there may be multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria in the game and the ”coordination problem” refers to the fact that rational equilibrium play canot rule out Pareto-dominated equilibria. In this paper, I prove that two elements asynchronicity and a finite horizon are sufficient to uniquely sele...

Two agents jointly operate a decreasing marginal returns technology to produce a private good. We characterize the class of output-sharing rules for which the labor-supply game has a unique Nash equilibrium. It consists of two families: rules of the serial type which protect a small user from the negative externality imposed by a large user, and rules of the reverse serial type, where one agent...

Some recent theoretical approaches to the question of how players might converge over time to a Nash equilibrium have assumed that the players update their beliefs about other players according to Bayes’ Rule. Jordan has shown in a Bayesian model of this kind that play will (theoretically) always converge to a complete-information Nash equilibrium, even though individual players will not genera...

More economists are interested in analyzing situations in which cooperative behavior within a coalition coexists with strategic behavior across the coalitions. The underlying equilibrium is defined as the hybrid solution with a distribution rule (HSDR), which could contribute to these studies to the same extent that Nash equilibrium does to strategic behavior. The paper also defines the stable ...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the OMC correspond to the behavioral rule “imitate the best.” In a redistribution game with utilitarian gov...