{"title":"Contests between Players with Mean-Variance Preferences","authors":"A. Robson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2143008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2143008","url":null,"abstract":"We study contests between players who rank uncertain outcomes using two parameters: the mean and the variance. This framework admits situations where players do not obey the axioms of expected utility maximization and represents an interesting modification of the usual assumptions in the contest literature. We demonstrate the existence of a unique equilibrium in the case of many heterogeneous players and examine a number of features of equilibrium behaviour. In a contest between two players who value the prize equally but have different strictly positive variance aversion parameters, the player with greater aversion to variance will put in less effort than the player with lower aversion to variance. If there are two identical variance averse players in the contest, we obtain an irrelevance result: even though the players are variance-averse and do not obey the axioms of expected utility theory, in equilibrium their efforts are identical to the equilibrium efforts of players who are risk neutral expected utility maximizers. Finally, we derive equilibrium efforts for the symmetric n>2 player case, and show that variance aversion unambiguously results in less rent dissipation than the risk neutral case.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"4 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134132973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Statistical Analysis of Results from Laboratory Studies in Experimental Economics: A Critique of Current Practice","authors":"D. Green, Andrej Tusicisny","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2181654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2181654","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on examples of recently published and widely-cited studies in experimental economics, we show that behavioral games are frequently analyzed in a manner that is prone to biased causal inference. First, deficiencies in design and implementation jeopardize the crucial assumption that treatments are statistically independent of potential outcomes. Researchers frequently do not randomly assign treatments or do not focus on randomly assigned factors when interpreting results. Second, many analyses of second mover behaviors in two-stage games, such as the ultimatum game and the trust game, are susceptible to bias. Third, uncontrolled stimuli, such as face-to-face interaction among subjects or the presentation of subjects’ photos, may also cause bias. Fourth, we discuss the limits of causal inference in repeated games, such as the public goods game. We recommend adjusting laboratory procedures and estimation methods in order to lessen reliance on substantive assumptions not grounded in experimental design.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126135547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Value of Recommendations","authors":"Jeanine Miklós-Thal, Heiner Schumacher","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1718474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1718474","url":null,"abstract":"Many markets without repeated seller–buyer relations feature third-party “monitors” that sell recommendations. We analyze the profit-maximizing recommendation policies of such monitors. In an infinitely repeated game with seller moral hazard and short-lived consumers, a monopolistic monitor with superior information about the sellerʼs past effort decisions sells recommendations about the seller to consumers. We show that the monitor has an incentive to make its recommendations hard to predict, which in general leads to inefficient effort provision by the seller. These results hold under perfect and imperfect monitoring and in a variety of informational setting. When there are multiple competing sellers, the conflict between the monitorʼs profit-maximization objective and efficient effort provision is mitigated.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126208611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supply Chain Configuration Under Information Sharing","authors":"M. Kashefi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2150077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2150077","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the effect of information sharing on supply chain configuration where the market characterized by demand uncertainty. A dynamic multi-stage game theoretic model with incomplete information is employed to capture the sequence of events. Our supply chain consists of two suppliers with exogenous wholesale prices and two retailers, the incumbent and the entrant, with asymmetric demand information. Informed incumbent prefers to conceal its private information from the entrant in order to reap more profits in the market. The channel of information flows is only through the first supplier and the incumbent can supply just from him, but the entrant is free to choose its proper supplier considering the point that the second supplier is uninformed. Our analytical model demonstrates that how the mean demand of the market, wherein our retailers compete, and its relation with the relative wholesale price of the suppliers play crucial role in equilibrium determination. Our results show under which circumstances separation and pooling equilibrium could occur in some range of demand variation. It is also shown that the entrant sometimes prefers to avoid information acquisition by choosing the second supplier and playing Cournot instead of Stackelberg which is more profitable for him in some occasions.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126477626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Signaling and Reputation in Repeated Games, II: Stackelberg Limit Properties","authors":"Charles Roddie","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2011835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2011835","url":null,"abstract":"Repeated signaling games are natural way to model reputation: past actions influence future expectations of actions via beliefs about an agent's type. This paper studies continually separating equilibria of infinite horizon repeated signaling games, extending Roddie (2012b).With a continuum of persistent types, if the signaler is patient he gains Stackelberg leadership, subject to separating from the lowest type. This remains true if the respondent cares directly about the signaler's type in addition to his actions. If the signaler has additively separable utility and is impatient, his actions maximize a discounted form of Stackelberg payoffs. In contrast to the usual theoretical approach to reputation there is no reliance on behavioral types.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124675943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finding a Good Price in Opaque Over-the-Counter Markets","authors":"Haoxiang Zhu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1500809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1500809","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a dynamic model of opaque over-the-counter markets. A seller searches for an attractive price by visiting multiple buyers, one at a time. The buyers do not observe contacts, quotes, or trades elsewhere in the market. A repeat contact with a buyer reveals the seller's reduced outside options and worsens the price offered by the revisited buyer. When the asset value is uncertain and common to all buyers, a visit by the seller suggests that other buyers could have quoted unattractive prices and thus worsens the visited buyer's inference regarding the asset value. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130716418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Competitive contagion in networks","authors":"S. Goyal, Michael Kearns","doi":"10.1145/2213977.2214046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2213977.2214046","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to \"seed\" the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. The payoffs to the firms are the eventual number of adoptions of their product through a competitive stochastic diffusion process in the network. This framework yields a rich class of competitive strategies, which depend in subtle ways on the stochastic dynamics of adoption, the relative budgets of the players, and the underlying structure of the social network.\u0000 We identify a general property of the adoption dynamics --- namely, decreasing returns to local adoption --- for which the inefficiency of resource use at equilibrium (the Price of Anarchy) is uniformly bounded above, across all networks. We also show that if this property is violated the Price of Anarchy can be unbounded, thus yielding sharp threshold behavior for a broad class of dynamics.\u0000 We also introduce a new notion, the Budget Multiplier, that measures the extent that imbalances in player budgets can be amplified at equilibrium. We again identify a general property of the adoption dynamics --- namely, proportional local adoption between competitors --- for which the (pure strategy) Budget Multiplier is uniformly bounded above, across all networks. We show that a violation of this property can lead to unbounded Budget Multiplier, again yielding sharp threshold behavior for a broad class of dynamics.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128049390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Dynamic Game for Essentiality of Fiat Money from the Perspective of GE","authors":"Zhiping Xie","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1857282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1857282","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses firstly why people have to use fiat money and then why they are rationally willing to accept it from the perspective of general equilibrium by using dynamic game to determine agents' expectation of its purchasing power in unrevealed future. Its model formulates the process that agents determine fiat money's nominal value in an infinite-time decentralized sequence economy where agents use fiat money to bridge markets to avoid huge transaction cost. It is proved that all agents' accepting fiat money with expectation of unchanged nominal value of it is Nash equilibrium so as to guarantee fiat money's essentiality.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115422942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stochastic Discounting in Repeated Games: Awaiting the Almost Inevitable","authors":"Mehmet Barlo, Can Urgun","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1753024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1753024","url":null,"abstract":"We study repeated games with pure strategies and stochastic discounting under perfect information, with the requirement that the stage game has at least one pure Nash action proflle. Players discount future payofis with a common, but stochastic, discount factor where associated stochastic discounting processes are required to satisfy Markov property, martingale property, having bounded increments, and possessing state spaces with rich ergodic subsets. We, additionally, demand that there are states resulting in discount factors arbitrarily close to 0, and that they are reachable with positive (yet, possibly arbitrarily small) probability in the long run. In this setting, we prove both the perfect Folk Theorem and our main result: The occurrence of any flnite number of consecutive repetitions of the period Nash action proflle, must almost surely happen within a flnite time window no matter which subgame perfect equilibrium strategy is considered and no matter how high the initial discount factor is.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126705070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preopening and Equilibrium Selection","authors":"R. Calcagno, S. Lovo","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1557137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1557137","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce a form of pre-play communication that we call \"preopening\". During the preopening, players announce their tentative actions to be played in the underlying game. Announcements are made using a posting system which is subject to stochastic failures. Posted actions are publicly observable and players payoffs only depend on the opening outcome, i.e. the action profile that is posted at the end of the preopening phase. We show that when the posting failures hit players idiosyncratically all equilibria of the preopening game lead to the same opening outcome that corresponds to the most \"sensible\" pure Nash equilibrium of the underlying game. By contrast preopening does not operate an equilibrium selection when posting failure hits players simultaneously.","PeriodicalId":319981,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Stochastic & Dynamic Games (Topic)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126443575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}