Many multiagent settings require a collection of agents to partition themselves into coalitions. In such cases, the agents may have conflicting preferences over the possible coalition structures that may form. We investigate a noncooperative bargaining game to allow the agents to resolve such conflicts and partition themselves into non-overlapping coalitions. The game has a finite horizon and i...

We examine behavioral gender differences and gender pairing effects in a laboratory experiment with face-to-face alternating-offers wage bargaining. Our results suggest that male players are able to obtain better bargaining outcomes than female players. Male employees get higher wages than female employees. Male employers pay lower wages to female employees than female employers pay to male emp...

Theories about sexual selection can be traced back to Darwin in 1871. He proposed that males fertilize as many females as possible with inexpensive sperm, whereas females, with a limited supply of large eggs, select the genetically highest quality males to endow their offspring with superior capabilities. Since its proposal, problems with this narrative have continued to accumulate, and it is o...

This paper presents a new extension of the Rubinstein-St̊ahl bargaining model to the case with n players, called sequential share bargaining. The bargaining protocol is natural and has as its main feature that the players’ shares in the cake are determined sequentially. The bargaining protocol requires unanimous agreement for proposals to be implemented. Unlike all existing bargaining protocols ...

We conduct a series of laboratory experiments to understand what role commitment and reputation play in bargaining. The experiments implement the Abreu and Gul (2000) bargaining model that demonstrates how introducing behavioral types, which are obstinate in their demands, creates incentives for all players to build reputations for being hard bargainers. The data are qualitatively consistent wi...

The main goal of this work is to design a team of agents that can accomplish consensus over a common value for the agents’ output using cooperative game theory approach. A semi-decentralized optimal control strategy that was recently introduced by the authors is utilized that is based on minimization of individual cost using local information. Cooperative game theory is then used to ensure team...

We report the first ultimatum game experiment with bargaining over waiting time. The experiment was created to avoid effects of windfall gains. In contrast to donated money, time is not endowed by the experimenter and implies a natural loss to the subjects. This allows for a better measurement of the inherent conflict in the ultimatum game. We implemented three anonymity conditions; one baselin...

Consensus problem with multi-agent systems has interested researchers in various areas. Its difficulties tend to appear when available information of each agent is limited for achieving consensus. Besides, it is not always the case that agents can catch the whole states of the others; an output is often the only possible measurement for each agent in applications. The idea of graph Laplacian is...

In this paper we study the support sizes of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) in random evolutionary games. We prove that, when the elements of the payoff matrix behave either as uniform, or normally distributed independent random variables, almost all ESS have support sizes o(n), where n is the number of possible types for a player. Our arguments are based exclusively on the severity of a s...

Experimental economics has revealed an underlying tension between preferences for fairness and the purely self-interested behavior assumed throughout economic theory. Though many models attempt to explain observed behavior that is inconsistent with theory, the motivations behind such deviations from theoretic equilibrium are still largely unknown. ! This paper investigates preferences for fairn...