{"title":"Introduction to 25+ years of quantal response equilibrium","authors":"Marco Battaglini , Thomas R. Palfrey","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2026.01.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2026.01.007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"157 ","pages":"Pages 376-378"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147538205","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":"Conventions in large games with randomly drawn payoffs","authors":"Jonathan Newton , Ryoji Sawa","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>By showing that a one-shot deviation property holds for almost all large games with i.i.d. randomly drawn payoffs in which a convention (in the sense of Young, 1993a) exists, long-run outcomes under behavioral rules are characterized by social choice rules.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"157 ","pages":"Pages 50-70"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146079351","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":"Sequential unanimity voting rules for binary social choice","authors":"Stergios Athanasoglou , Somouaoga Bonkoungou","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2026.02.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2026.02.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider a group of voters that needs to decide between two candidates. In this setting, M-winning coalition rules are characterized by neutrality and strategy-proofness (Moulin, 1983). Their practical implementation motivates the introduction of sequential unanimity rules. We develop algorithms that transform a given M-winning coalition rule into an equivalent sequential unanimity rule and vice versa. The sequential unanimity rules that are constructed present computational advantages compared to their M-winning counterparts. The analysis extends to the full preference domain. Since M-winning coalition rules are closely related to strong and proper simple games, the analysis is relevant to this strand of the game-theoretic literature as well.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"157 ","pages":"Pages 263-285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147384943","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":"Present-bias and the value of sophistication: Splurging vs. smoothing","authors":"Subas Acharya , David Jimenez-Gomez , Dmitrii Rachinskii , Alejandro Rivera","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops a dynamic wealth management model for risk-averse agents displaying present-bias in the form of hyperbolic discounting. The agent chooses optimal consumption and labor supply policies and allocates her funds between a risk-free asset, a traded liquid asset, and a non-traded illiquid asset. We characterize these policies for both sophisticated and naive present-biased agents. There are three results. First, sophisticated agents overconsume more and supply less labor than their naive counterparts if and only if their elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) is greater than one. This result arises from the interplay of the smoothing and the splurging effect, which exactly cancel out when the EIS equals one. As a result, sophistication is welfare reducing (increasing) when EIS is high (low). Second, higher stock market volatility and worsening investment opportunities make the sophisticated agent relatively better off than her naive counterpart. Finally, when borrowing constraints are binding and absorbing asset illiquidity serves as a commitment device to mitigate overconsumption and thereby increase welfare.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"157 ","pages":"Pages 186-225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147385029","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":"Pork barrel politics, voter turnout, and inequality: An experimental study","authors":"Jens Großer , Thorsten Giertz","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2024.02.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2024.02.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We experimentally study pork barrel politics in repeated two-candidate majoritarian elections with costly voting. Candidates form distinct supporter groups by favoring some voters in budget spending and ignoring others. Relative to compulsory voting, voluntary voting induces on average larger, more narrowly targeted favors and therefore more inequality among otherwise identical voters. Against our prediction, candidate participants tend to cultivate policy polarization by repeatedly favoring their exclusive supporters and avoiding those of the opponent. With compulsory voting, they tolerate some additional policy overlap for a separate subset of voters. Relating to theory, actual levels and patterns of voluntary turnout are well captured by <em>quantal response equilibrium</em> (QRE) for a noise parameter estimate external to our experiment. Importantly, and surprisingly, for reasonable assumption we find unique QRE solutions for our polity games, which include the policymaking stage and each of the many possible elections that can emerge from that stage.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"157 ","pages":"Pages 464-479"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139921538","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":"Choice and welfare under social constraints","authors":"Mauricio Ribeiro","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Economists often rely on people’ s choices to infer their preferences. However, inferring preferences from choices becomes problematic when people face unobserved constraints. In this paper, I study how to (cautiously) infer preferences from choices when the choices of the members of a social group are subject to a constraint that we only imperfectly know. When this happens, heterogeneity in the group’ s choices, along with more information about the constraint, helps recover the preferences of group members, whereas homogeneity in choices hinders it. I further argue that standard approaches to choice-based welfare analysis can lead to misleading inferences about welfare when there are unobserved social constraints.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"156 ","pages":"Pages 1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145659081","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}
Mustafa Oǧuz Afacan , Umut Dur , A. Arda Gitmez , Özgür Yılmaz
{"title":"Improving the deferred acceptance with minimal compromise","authors":"Mustafa Oǧuz Afacan , Umut Dur , A. Arda Gitmez , Özgür Yılmaz","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.12.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In school choice problems, the pursuit of student welfare (efficiency) is constrained by the requirement to respect schools’ priorities (fairness). Among fair matchings, even the welfare maximizing one, the Student-Optimal Stable Matching (<em>SOSM</em>), is inefficient. Moreover, any mechanism that yields welfare gains over the <em>SOSM</em> is manipulable by students. This paper investigates the fairness and incentive properties of efficient mechanisms. We compare matchings using the notion that one matching is <em>less unfair</em> than another if it generates a smaller set of students whose priorities are violated, and we define <em>minimal unfairness</em> accordingly. We show that the Efficiency-Adjusted Deferred Acceptance (<em>EADA</em>) mechanism is minimally unfair within the class of Pareto efficient mechanisms satisfying a simple incentive requirement, <em>top-manipulation-proofness</em>. Moreover, the <em>EADA</em> satisfies a stronger property, <em>upper-manipulation-proofness</em>. Upper-manipulation-proofness is a broad incentive property one can maintain while improving upon the <em>SOSM</em>. Together, these results highlight a sharp frontier in school choice: when the objective is efficiency and improving student welfare over the <em>SOSM</em>, the <em>EADA</em> emerges as a compelling mechanism in both fairness and incentive terms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"156 ","pages":"Pages 64-81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145840873","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":"A note on the non-coincidence of the core and the bargaining set in many-to-one assignment markets","authors":"Ata Atay , Marina Núñez , Tamás Solymosi","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyzes the extent to which well-known results on the relationship between the bargaining set, the core, and the kernel in one-to-one assignment games generalize to many-to-one assignment markets, and by extension, many-to-many markets. Using a minimal counterexample, we show that the bargaining set does not necessarily coincide with the core and that the kernel may not be contained within the core. We would like to highlight that the failure of the coincidence between the core and the bargaining set, as observed in the many-to-one assignment game, is quite notable. This is especially true when compared to various other highly structured games, many of which emerge from combinatorial optimization problems, such as the one underlying many-to-one assignment games.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"156 ","pages":"Pages 58-63"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145750259","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":"Risk-taking in financial networks","authors":"Mohamed Belhaj , Renaud Bourlès , Frédéric Deroïan","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We analyze risk-taking behaviors of financial institutions linked through cross-shareholding relationships. We endogenize risk exposure accounting for default risk by modeling Value-at-Risk-based risk-management – that is targeted default probabilities – in the presence of extreme risk on asset return. We relate risk-taking behaviors to a centrality measure that captures the propagation of losses within the network, and show that network integration increases risk-taking levels and expected return. However, we show that network integration also results in larger expected shortfall, indicating greater exposure to losses for creditors. We explore the impact of the cross-shareholding network on the implementation of regulation, particularly through capital requirements, and identify key institutions, those with the highest influence on aggregate investments in risky assets.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"156 ","pages":"Pages 35-57"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145694293","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":"Provoking the opposition","authors":"Korhan Kocak","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.11.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Parties in primary elections often choose between candidates who appeal to their base and those who appeal to the broader electorate. I present a model of primaries where incumbents can exploit this trade-off the opposition faces between ideological congruence and electability. In the model, incumbents reduce their appeal to the median voter by moving away from the center. In doing so, they provoke the opposition into nominating extremists, improving their reelection prospects. This mechanism generates elite polarization as politicians leapfrog voters — not despite electoral concerns, but because of them. The analysis fits the observation that incumbents sometimes move away from the center near the end of their term. Provoking the opposition relies on two conditions: divergence of primary and general electorates and a limited set of potential nominees. I argue that partisan sorting and changes in nomination procedures over the last decades made this strategy viable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"156 ","pages":"Pages 14-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145694782","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}