When agents have conflicting preferences over a set of alternatives and they want to make a joint decision, a natural way to do so is by voting. How to design and analyze desirable voting rules has been studied by economists for centuries. In recent decades, technological advances, especially those in internet economy, have introduced many new applications for voting theory. For example, we can...

In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in which minority party supporters sometimes vote ideologically (for their party) and sometimes strategically (against the party they like the least). The competit...

We model a player’s decision as a choice set and analyze equilibria in which each player’s choice set is a best response to the other players’ sets. We formalize the notion of best response by an abstract “choice structure,” which captures iteratively undominated strategies (for several definitions of dominance), rationalizability, and a number of formulations of choice sets. We investigate pro...

The scale of the required changes is huge, and time is limited if we are to avoid the most severe effects of climate change. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, several fuels and electricity originating from renewable energy sources have been proposed, all of them in different stages of development and with various and shifting environmental impacts. This thesis aims at incr...

The commoditization of low-cost hardware has enabled even modest-sized laboratories and research projects to own their own “supercomputers.” We argue that this local solution undermines rather than amplifies the research potential of scholars. CIOs, provosts, and research technologists should consider carefully an overall strategy to provision sustainable cyberinfrastructure in support of resea...

We introduce a modification to the two-timescale games studied in the evolution of preferences (EOP) literature. In this modification, the strategic process occurring on the long timescale is learning by an individual across his or her lifetime, not natural selection operating on genomes over multiple generations. This change to the longer timescale removes many of the formal difficulties of EO...

Existing theories identify elements of a firm’s intangible value as possible reasons for alliance formation. However, the question of how firms come to know the extent of this intangible value is often not addressed. This study proposes that knowledge flows between organizations are the basis for identifying a partner firm’s intangible value. This research suggests that alliances which overlap ...

I study experimentally a single-shot trust game where players have the opportunity to choose an avatar—a computer-generated face—to represent them. These avatars vary on several dimensions—trustworthiness, dominance, and threat—identified by previous work as influencing perceptions of those who view the faces (Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008). I take this previous work and ask whether ...

In order to remedy the possible loss of strategic interaction in non-atomic games with a societal choice, this study proposes a refinement of Nash equilibrium, strategic equilibrium. Given a non-atomic game, its perturbed game is one in which every player believes that he alone has a small, but positive, impact on the societal choice; and a strategy is a strategic equilibrium if it is a limit p...