Two standard schemes for awarding a prize have been examined in the literature. The prize is awarded (πD) deterministically: to the contestant with the highest output; (πP ) probabilistically: to all contestants, with probabilities proportional to their outputs. Our main result is that if there is suffi cient diversity in contestants’skills, and not too much noise on output, then πP will elicit...

We propose a model on strategic formation of communication networks with (i) link specificity: the more direct links somebody maintains, the less she can specify her attention per link, the lower her links’ value, while this negative externality was previously ignored in the communication context, and (ii) value transferability via indirect links for informational but not for social value from ...

It is well established for evolutionary dynamics in asymmetric games that a pure strategy combination is asymptotically stable if and only if it is a strict Nash equilibrium. We use an extension of the notion of a strict Nash equilibrium to sets of strategy combinations called ‘strict equilibrium set’ and show the following. For a large class of evolutionary dynamics, including all monotone reg...

In the problem of assigning indivisible goods and monetary transfers, we characterize welfareegalitarian mechanisms (that are decision-efficient and incentive compatible) with an axiom of solidarity under preference changes and a fair ranking axiom of order preservation. This result is in line with characterizations of egalitarian rules with solidarity in other economic models. We also show tha...

We analyze the political philosophy question of what kind of welfare differentials are allowed if we respect private ownership rights over self and public ownership of the external world. We consider cases where agents have equal rights over the publicly owned external world resources but are individually responsible for their preferences. We discuss that these ownership rights are naturally re...

We consider the situation in which individuals in a ̄nite population must repeatedly choose an action yielding an uncertain payo®. Between choices, each individual may observe the performance of one other individual. We search for rules of behavior with limited memory that increase expected payo®s for any underlying payo® distribution. It is shown that the rule that outperforms all other rules ...

This paper considers the dynamic evolution of algorithmic (recursive) learning rules in a normal form game. It is shown that the system | the population frequencies | is globally stable for any arbitrary N -player normal form game, if the evolutionary process is algorithmic and the `birth process' guarantees that an appropriate set of `smart' rules is present in the population. The result is in...

Pullorum disease affecting poultry is caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Pullorum and results in severe economic loss every year, especially in countries with a developing poultry industry. The pathogenesis of S. Pullorum is not yet well defined, as the specific virulence factors still need to be identified. Thus, to isolate specific DNA fragments belonging to S. Pullorum, this study used su...

This paper applies quantal response equilibrium (QRE) models (McKelvey and Palfrey, Games and Economic Behavior 10 (1995), 6-38) to a wide class of symmetric coordination games in which each player's best response is determined by an order statistic of all players' decisions, as in the classic experiments of Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil (American Economic Review 80 (1990), 234-248; Quarterly J...

In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm’s productive asset, embedding the relevant decision makers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while she acts as an agent in relation to certain other decision makers. We study under which conditions dec...