{"title":"Contract breach with overconfident expectations: Experimental evidence on reference-dependent preferences","authors":"Sabine Fischer , Kerstin Grosch","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the effect of agents' overconfident expectations in their production on their contract breach. Drawing on a reference-dependent framework, we theoretically deduce propositions for compliance to agreements where an agent exhibits overconfidence and loss aversion. We further conduct a lab experiment with a multiple-stage design and find that overconfident agents are more likely to breach the contract than non-overconfident agents. Moreover, overconfident agents breach more often and to a greater extent with increasing loss aversion. We also test the impact of a non-deterministic environment (“shock condition”) where payoff misestimation can be masked compared to a deterministic environment (“no-shock condition”). Agents breach more often in the shock condition, but breach extent remains unaffected. Results are mostly in line with the theoretical framework. In a treatment, we manipulate agents' overconfidence exogenously and use it as an instrument to establish causality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 145-163"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144271798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Data provision to an informed seller","authors":"Shota Ichihashi , Alex Smolin","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. A designer can provide the seller with additional information, which the seller uses to price discriminate the buyer. We demonstrate the difficulty of screening the seller's information: When the buyer's value is binary, no combination of buyer surplus and seller profit can be implemented other than those achieved by providing the same information to all seller types. We use the result to characterize the set of implementable welfare outcomes and demonstrate the trade-off between buyer surplus and efficiency.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 131-144"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144263720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Strategy-proofness, efficiency, and the core in matching problems with transfers","authors":"Shuhei Morimoto","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study a class of matching problems in which monetary transfers are possible. In this paper, we establish a close connection between the core and the existence of desirable rules that satisfy strategy-proofness or one-sided strategy-proofness. In our main result, we show that the optimal core is a unified lower bound of welfare for the existence of rules that satisfy strategy-proofness (or one-sided strategy-proofness), efficiency, individual rationality, and no subsidy. Applying this result, we also obtain impossibility and characterization results in our environment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 30-41"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144241155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Favor exchange with private costs: An experiment","authors":"Arianna Degan , Yushen Li , Huan Xie","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We conduct an experiment on a two-player infinitely repeated favor exchange game. In the stage game, each player decides whether to provide a favor to the other player. A favor generates a fixed benefit for the recipient and a cost for the provider, which can be either low or high. We study the situation where this cost is private information and it is efficient to provide a favor only when the cost is low. We address two general questions: 1) To what extent do subjects exchange favors in ways that are payoff enhancing, given that private information hinders exchanging favors efficiently? 2) Which strategies do subjects choose and what are the driving forces behind their choices? We focus on Stationary Strongly Symmetric (SSS) strategies, where players play the same strategy after any history, and Equality Matching (EM) strategies, where subjects keep track of the net tallies of favors. We find that overall subjects exchange favors to a relatively large extent and achieve an average payoff-efficiency index exceeding 60%. Although simple strategies, as SSS, are played with the highest frequency, more complex strategies, as EM, explain an important proportion of the data. Subjects' behavior is not always consistent with incentive compatibility or driven by the attainment of higher ex-ante payoffs. The results also suggest that rewarding subjects for trusting and reciprocating might be more acceptable than requiring them to take very costly actions on the equilibrium path, even when it is overall payoff enhancing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 94-112"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144263718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The matching benefits of market thickness","authors":"Simon Loertscher , Ellen V. Muir","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The ability of larger markets to mitigate the incentive problem created by private information has been the focus of a sizable economics literature. In contrast, the fact that thicker markets also reduce the double coincidence of wants problem has received little attention. Modeling thin markets as bilateral trade involving independent private values and thick markets as Walrasian markets with a continuum of traders, we analyze and quantify the <em>matching benefits</em> of market thickness. These benefits increase with the <em>nicheness</em> of a product, which we measure as the mass of values and costs outside an interval of overlapping support where there are positive gains from trade. For sufficient nicheness, profit-maximizing intermediaries operating thick markets outperform ex post efficient bilateral trade. However, with bilateral trade as an outside option, traders of niche products are most vulnerable to intermediaries' market power. Extensions consider fixed costs of operating thick markets and finitely thick markets.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 42-66"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144254383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Condorcet-consistent choice among three candidates","authors":"Felix Brandt , Chris Dong , Dominik Peters","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A voting rule is a Condorcet extension if it returns a candidate that beats every other candidate in pairwise majority comparisons whenever one exists. Condorcet extensions have faced criticism due to their susceptibility to variable-electorate paradoxes, especially the reinforcement paradox (<span><span>Young and Levenglick, 1978</span></span>) and the no-show paradox (<span><span>Moulin, 1988b</span></span>). In this paper, we investigate the susceptibility of Condorcet extensions to these paradoxes for the case of exactly three candidates. For the reinforcement paradox, we establish that it must occur for every Condorcet extension when there are <em>at least eight</em> voters and demonstrate that certain refinements of maximin—a voting rule originally proposed by <span><span>Condorcet (1785)</span></span>—are immune to this paradox when there <em>are at most seven</em> voters. For the no-show paradox, we prove that the <em>only</em> homogeneous Condorcet extensions immune to it are refinements of maximin. We also provide axiomatic characterizations of maximin and two of its refinements, Nanson's rule and leximin, highlighting their suitability for three-candidate elections.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 113-130"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144263719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Austin Brooksby , Jacob Meyer , Lucas Rentschler , Vernon Smith , Robbie Spofford
{"title":"“Equilibrium play in voluntary ultimatum games: Beneficence cannot be extorted” - Comment","authors":"Austin Brooksby , Jacob Meyer , Lucas Rentschler , Vernon Smith , Robbie Spofford","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div><span><span>Smith and Wilson (2018)</span></span> argue that behavior in the ultimatum game may be due to the typical implementation, in which players are not given the opportunity to opt out of the game. Using insights from <span><span>Smith (1759)</span></span>, they suggest that making play voluntary would increase rates of equilibrium play. They conducted an augmented ultimatum game where the responder first decides whether to participate, and compare their experimental data to stylized facts from the literature, reporting “far higher rates of equilibrium play...than heretofore reported”. However, they do not run standard versions of the ultimatum game as a control. To ensure their interpretation is warranted, we conducted experiments of both their augmented game and an analogous standard ultimatum game. In our data, rates of equilibrium play were not higher in the augmented game. Thus, we find no support for the primary conclusion of <span><span>Smith and Wilson (2018)</span></span>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 67-93"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144254384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No trade under verifiable information","authors":"Spyros Galanis","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>No trade theorems examine conditions under which agents cannot agree to disagree on the value of a security which pays according to some state of nature, thus preventing any mutual agreement to trade. A large literature has examined conditions which imply no trade, such as relaxing the common prior and common knowledge assumptions, as well as allowing for agents who are boundedly rational or ambiguity averse. We contribute to this literature by examining conditions on the private information of agents that reveals, or verifies, the true value of the security. We argue that these conditions can offer insights in three different settings: insider trading, the connection of low liquidity in markets with no trade, and trading using public blockchains and oracles.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144222433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jens Gudmundsson , Jens Leth Hougaard , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero , Lars Peter Østerdal
{"title":"Optimizing successive incentives: Rewarding the past or motivating the future?","authors":"Jens Gudmundsson , Jens Leth Hougaard , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero , Lars Peter Østerdal","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study sequential processes where agents create value through costly and uncertain investments, with success triggering further investment decisions by others. Our paper focuses on designing optimal allocation rules that distribute the total value generated among agents, balancing the recognition of past contributions with incentives for future investments. We prove the existence of equilibrium in the game induced by any such rule and identify a unique investment profile that maximizes the overall expected welfare in the sequential process. This profile can be supported in equilibrium by a simple rule. Additionally, we show that there is a unique investment profile maximizing the initiator's expected payoff and provide a method for the initiator to design a rule supporting it. We extend the model to scenarios where agents' investments are constrained by the value generated within the process. Our findings demonstrate that relatively simple reward structures that prioritize short-term incentives can effectively achieve long-term systemic goals.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 10-29"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144241154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bargaining with binary private information","authors":"Francesc Dilmé","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines bargaining between a seller and a buyer with a binary private valuation. The seller offers a price to the buyer in each period. We explicitly construct the complete equilibrium set via an induction argument both for the finite and infinite horizon cases. When the horizon is finite and the probability of a high buyer valuation is large, the seller consistently charges a high price, resulting in trade bursts at the outset and deadline, with constant trade rates in between. We also show that the seller may be worse off when the low buyer's valuation increases and that the buyer may be better off when the seller has commitment than when not. We relate our results to previous findings on bargaining with two-sided offers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 423-442"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144169231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}