Since utilities and probabilities jointly determine choices, event-dependent utilities complicate the elicitation of subjective event probabilities. However, for the usual purpose of obtaining the information embodied in agent beliefs, it is sufficient to elicit objective probabilities, i.e., probabilities obtained by updating a known common prior with that agent’s further information. Bayesian...

Duverger’s law postulates that single-member plurality electoral systems lead to two-party systems. Existing scholarship regards India as an exception to this law at national level, but not at district level. This study tests the latter hypothesis through analysis of a comprehensive dataset covering Indian parliamentary elections in the period 1952–2004. The results show that a large number of ...

This paper describes an approach to reinforcement learning in multiagent general-sum games in which a learner is told to treat each other agent as either a \friend" or \foe". This Q-learning-style algorithm provides strong convergence guarantees compared to an existing Nash-equilibrium-based learning rule.

A learning rule is uncoupled if a player does not condition his strategy on the opponent’s payoffs. It is radically uncoupled if a player does not condition his strategy on the opponent’s actions or payoffs. We demonstrate a family of simple, radically uncoupled learning rules whose period-by-period behavior comes arbitrarily close to Nash equilibrium behavior in any finite two-person game.

The paper explores a model of equilibrium selection in coordination games, where agents from an infinite population stochastically adjust their strategies to changes in their local environment. Instead of playing perturbed best-response, it is assumed that agents follow a rule of `switching to better strategies with higher probability'. This behavioral rule is related to bounded-rationality mod...

Hyperfunctions are social choice rules which assign sets of alternatives to preference profiles over sets. So, they are more general objects compared to standard (social choice) correspondences. Thus every correspondence can be expressed in terms of an equivalent hyperfunction. We postulate the equivalence between implementing a correspondence and its equivalent hyperfunction. We give a partial...

A continuous-time version of the multivariate stopping problem is considered. Associated with vector valued jump stochastic processes, stopping problems with a monotone logical rule are defined under the notion of Nash equilibrium point. The existence of an equilibrium strategy and its characterization by integral equations are obtained. Illustrative examples are provided.

We show that in the context of repeated implementation, any social choice rule which realizes all alternatives for a positive (yet arbitrarily small) amount of time is Nash implementable. The results complement those of the virtual implementation literature. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Consider a society with a finite number of sectors (social issues or commodities). In a partial equilibrium (PE) mechanism a sector authority (SA) aims to elicit agents’preference rankings for outcomes at hand, presuming separability of preferences, while such presumption is false in general and such isolated rankings might be artifacts. Therefore, its participants are required to behave as if ...

We analyze bargaining situations where the agents’ payoffs from disagreement depend on who among them breaks down the negotiations. We model such problems as a superset of the standard domain of Nash (1950). We first show that this domain extension creates a very large number of new rules. Particularly, decomposable rules (which are extensions of rules from the Nash domain) constitute a nowhere...