{"title":"Endogenous limits on veto power in dynamic bargaining","authors":"Ravideep Sethi , Ewout Verriest","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.014","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.014","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider an infinitely repeated legislative bargaining model with a dynamically evolving status quo. Three players, one of whom is permanently endowed with veto power, must split a fixed budget in each period. Despite her additional power, the veto player cannot always asymptotically extract the full surplus. The non-veto players endogenously prevent each other's expropriation when they are patient and have high initial allocations in the unique stationary, symmetric, stage-undominated, coalition-proof Markov perfect equilibrium. Further, we show that veto power and higher recognition probability may be strategic substitutes rather than complements. We also provide an intuition behind selfish egalitarianism between non-veto players. Our technique of employing coalition-proofness and iteratively generating a new equilibrium with novel predictions sheds light on the divergence in recent literature on the value of veto power and may be useful in other environments.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 345-370"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144069878","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}
Jeanne Hagenbach , Nicolas Jacquemet , Philipp Sternal
{"title":"The motivated memory of noise","authors":"Jeanne Hagenbach , Nicolas Jacquemet , Philipp Sternal","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We propose a two-stage experiment in which people receive feedback about their relative intelligence. This feedback is a noisy message reminded at every stage, so that subjects cannot forget this ego-relevant information. Instead, we exogenously vary whether the informativeness of the message is reminded in the second stage. We investigate how this treatment variation affects the informativeness reported by subjects, and their posterior beliefs about their intelligence. We show that subjects report informativeness in a self-serving way: subjects with negative messages report that these messages are significantly less informative in the absence of reminder than with it. We also show that the lack of reminder about message informativeness allows subjects to keep a better image of themselves. These results are confirmed by complementary treatments in which we decrease messages informativeness: subjects tend to inflate the informativeness of positive messages that should now be interpreted as bad news.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 257-275"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942277","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":"Matching with transfers under distributional constraints","authors":"Devansh Jalota, Michael Ostrovsky, Marco Pavone","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study two-sided many-to-one matching markets with transferable utilities in which money can exchange hands between matched agents, subject to distributional constraints on the set of feasible allocations. In such markets, we establish that equilibrium arrangements are surplus-maximizing and study the conditions on the distributional constraints under which equilibria exist and can be computed efficiently when agents have linear preferences. Our main result is a linear programming duality method to efficiently compute equilibrium arrangements under sufficient conditions on the constraint structure guaranteeing equilibrium existence. This linear programming approach provides a method to compute market equilibria in polynomial time in the number of firms, workers, and the cardinality of the constraint set.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 313-332"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942279","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":"Iterated exclusion of implausible types in signaling games","authors":"Francesc Dilmé","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div><span><span>Cho and Kreps (1987)</span></span> proposed a series of criteria for selecting equilibria in signaling games. Their procedure for applying each criterion was to identify all implausible sender types associated with a given off-path message, then look for sequential equilibria assigning probability zero to every implausible type. This paper provides a systematic study of iterated applications of <span><span>Cho and Kreps (1987)</span></span> criteria—where in each round, one excludes the additional types that become implausible because given the previously excluded types—, some of which have been proposed in different forms in the literature. Importantly, we show that the iterated exclusion of implausible types selects the same equilibria independently of the exclusion order, and, as a result, it is stronger yet more flexible and often easier to implement than the corresponding criterion. We prove that sequentially stable outcomes (<span><span>Dilmé, 2024</span></span>), which exist in all finite signaling games, pass all iterated exclusion procedures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 293-312"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942278","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}
Kevin Bauer, Michael Kosfeld, Ferdinand A. von Siemens
{"title":"Incentives, self-selection, and coordination of motivated agents for the production of social goods","authors":"Kevin Bauer, Michael Kosfeld, Ferdinand A. von Siemens","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study, theoretically and empirically, the effect of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce “social” goods in the presence of positive effort complementarities. Theory predicts that lowering incentives increases social-good production via the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents into low-incentive work environments. We test this prediction in a novel lab experiment that allows us to isolate the effect of self-selection cleanly. Results show that social-good production more than doubles if incentives are low, but only if self-selection is possible. The analysis identifies a crucial role of incentives in the matching and coordination of motivated agents.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 276-292"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942304","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}
Stergios Athanasoglou , Somouaoga Bonkoungou , Lars Ehlers
{"title":"Strategy-proof preference aggregation and the anonymity-neutrality tradeoff","authors":"Stergios Athanasoglou , Somouaoga Bonkoungou , Lars Ehlers","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.015","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.015","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Consider a setting in which individual strict preferences need to be aggregated into a social strict preference relation. For two alternatives and an odd number of agents, it follows from May's Theorem that the majority aggregation rule is the only one satisfying anonymity, neutrality and strategy-proofness (SP). For more than two alternatives, anonymity and neutrality are incompatible for many problem instances and we explore this tradeoff for strategy-proof rules. The notion of SP that we employ is Kemeny-SP (K-SP), which is based on the Kemeny distance between social orderings and strengthens previously used concepts in an intuitive manner. Dropping anonymity and keeping neutrality, we identify and analyze the first known nontrivial family of K-SP rules, namely semi-dictator rules. For two agents, semi-dictator rules are characterized by strong unanimity, neutrality and K-SP. For an arbitrary number of agents, we generalize semi-dictator rules to allow for committees and show that they retain their desirable properties. Dropping neutrality and keeping anonymity, we establish possibility results for three alternatives. We provide a computer-aided solution to the existence of a strongly unanimous, anonymous and K-SP rule for two agents and four alternatives. Finally, we show that there is no K-SP and anonymous rule which always chooses one of the agents' preferences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 216-240"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143922739","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}
Orestis Kopsacheilis , Dennie van Dolder , Ozan Isler
{"title":"Conditional cooperation under uncertainty: The social description-experience gap","authors":"Orestis Kopsacheilis , Dennie van Dolder , Ozan Isler","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Conditional cooperation is typically studied in experimental settings where the behavior of others is known to subjects. In this study, we examine conditional cooperation under uncertainty. Using a novel experimental design, we exogenously manipulate the likelihood that a subject's partner in a Prisoner's Dilemma will cooperate. Information about the partner's cooperation is either presented descriptively or learned through experiential sampling. We observe a description-experience gap: subjects are more likely to cooperate under experience than under description when their partner's probability of cooperation is low, while the opposite holds when it is 50% or higher. This result contrasts with expectations deriving from the individual choice literature, where rare events are typically underweighted in experience-based decisions. We find that the gap we observe is driven by conditional cooperators being less responsive to social information acquired experientially than to that acquired descriptively. Furthermore, we show that stronger priors held by subjects under social uncertainty compared to individual uncertainty can account for the disparity with the individual choice literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 241-256"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143922740","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":"Core thresholds of symmetric majority voting games","authors":"Takaaki Abe","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider a committee that consists of n members with one person one vote approving a proposal if the number of affirmative votes from the members reaches threshold k. Which threshold k between 1 and n is “stable” for the committee? We suppose that if a new threshold k' proposed by some committee members obtains k or more affirmative votes, then the new threshold replaces the current one. Assuming that each member has preferences for the set of possible thresholds, we analyze which threshold meets the stability requirements of the core and stable sets. In addition, based on our stability study, we argue that a committee needs to employ two distinct thresholds: one for ordinary issues and another just for threshold changes. To embody this idea, we propose a method, called the constant threshold method, and show that our method always generates a nonempty refinement of the core. We also provide an axiomatic characterization of our method.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 199-215"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143912900","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":"Borda rule and arrow's independence condition in finite societies","authors":"Guy Barokas , Shmuel Nitzan","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In his refined characterization of the Borda rule, Maskin (2025; forthcoming in the <em>Journal of Political Economy</em>) significantly employs the assumption of a continuum of voters. He concludes by posing an important open question about the possible extension of the characterization result to the case of finitely many voters. This note provides a positive response to this question, based on a novel axiom that conveys the normative appeal of continuity when applied to a discrete setting, namely, that the social rule is not overly sensitive to a small change in voters' preferences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 175-180"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143868550","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":"Polarizing persuasion","authors":"Axel Anderson , Nikoloz Pkhakadze","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We introduce an equilibrium model of polarizing communication between a sender and two receivers. The sender's payoff is a function of the receivers' beliefs on a binary payoff relevant variable. All agents share a common prior about this variable. But we assume disagreement about a second binary variable, which enters no utility functions. We characterize the joint distribution of receiver posterior beliefs on the payoff relevant variable that can be implemented. An immediate consequence of this characterization is that the sender's payoff is non-decreasing in the prior disagreement between the two receivers. We measure <em>polarization</em> as the sender's expectation of the absolute difference between the receivers' posterior beliefs on the payoff relevant variable, and solve for the maximum polarization across all message services. Given extreme prior disagreement between the receivers, we solve for the optimal message service when the sender has monotone payoffs that are bi-concave or bi-convex.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"152 ","pages":"Pages 181-198"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143868551","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}