-
作者:Hatfield, John William; Kominers, Scott Duke; Nichifor, Alexandru; Ostrovsky, Michael; Westkamp, Alexander
作者单位:University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; Harvard University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Melbourne; Stanford University; University of Cologne
摘要:Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models' definitions of substitutability to settings in which each agent can be both a buyer in some transactions and a seller in others, and show that all these definitions are equivalent. We then introduce a new class of substitutable preferences that allows us t...
-
作者:Richter, Michael; Rubinstein, Ariel
作者单位:University of London; Royal Holloway University London; Tel Aviv University; New York University
摘要:We suggest a concept of convexity of preferences that does not rely on any algebraic structure. A decision maker has in mind a set of orderings interpreted as evaluation criteria. A preference relation is defined to be convex when it satisfies the following condition: If, for each criterion, there is an element that is both inferior to b by the criterion and superior to a by the preference relation, then b is preferred to a. This definition generalizes the standard Euclidean definition of conv...
-
作者:Gershkov, Alex; Moldovanu, Benny; Shi, Xianwen
作者单位:Hebrew University of Jerusalem; University of Surrey; University of Bonn; University of Toronto
摘要:We study a multidimensional collective decision under incomplete information. Agents have Euclidean preferences and vote by simple majority on each issue (dimension), yielding the coordinate-wise median. Judicious rotations of the orthogonal axes-the issues that are voted upon-lead to welfare improvements. If the agents' types are drawn from a distribution with independent marginals, then under weak conditions, voting on the original issues is not optimal. If the marginals are identical (but n...
-
作者:Duncan, Alfred; Nolan, Charles
作者单位:University of Kent; University of Glasgow
摘要:We show how the prospect of disputes over firms' revenue reports promotes debt financing over equity. This is demonstrated in a costly state verification model with a risk-averse entrepreneur. The prospect of disputes encourages incentive contracts that limit penalties and avoid stochastic monitoring, even when the lender can commit to stochastic monitoring. Consequently, optimal contracts shift from equity toward standard debt. In short, when audit signals are weakly correlated with true inco...
-
作者:Battaglini, Marco; Lamba, Rohit
作者单位:Cornell University; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park
摘要:We explore the conditions under which the first-order approach (FO approach) can be used to characterize profit maximizing contracts in dynamic principal-agent models. The FO approach works when the resulting FO-optimal contract satisfies a particularly strong form of monotonicity in types, a condition that is satisfied in most of the solved examples studied in the literature. The main result of our paper is to show that except for nongeneric choices of the stochastic process governing the typ...
-
作者:Auster, Sarah; Gottardi, Piero
作者单位:Bocconi University; Bocconi University; University of Essex
摘要:We study directed search equilibria in a decentralized market with adverse selection, where uninformed buyers post general trading mechanisms and informed sellers select one of them. We show that this has differing and significant implications with respect to the traditional approach, based on bilateral contracting between the parties. In equilibrium, all buyers post the same mechanism and low-quality sellers receive priority in any meeting with a buyer. Also, buyers make strictly higher profi...
-
作者:Monzon, Ignacio
作者单位:University of Turin; Collegio Carlo Alberto
摘要:I present a model of observational learning with payoff interdependence. Agents, ordered in a sequence, receive private signals about an uncertain state of the world and sample previous actions. Unlike in standard models of observational learning, an agent's payoff depends both on the state and on the actions of others. Agents want both to learn the state and to anticipate others' play. As the sample of previous actions provides information on both dimensions, standard informational externalit...
-
作者:Brandl, Florian; Brandt, Felix
作者单位:Stanford University; Technical University of Munich
摘要:Developing normative foundations for optimal play in two-player zero-sum games has turned out to be surprisingly difficult, despite the powerful strategic implications of the minimax theorem. We characterize maximin strategies by postulating coherent behavior in varying games. The first axiom, called consequentialism, states that how probability is distributed among completely indistinguishable actions is irrelevant. The second axiom, consistency, demands that strategies that are optimal in tw...
-
作者:Cripps, Martin W.; Thomas, Caroline D.
作者单位:University of London; University College London; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要:We analyze the social and private learning at the symmetric equilibria of a queueing game with strategic experimentation. An infinite sequence of agents arrive at a server that processes them at an unknown rate. The number of agents served at each date is either a geometric random variable in the good state or zero in the bad state. The queue lengthens with each new arrival and shortens if the agents are served or choose to quit the queue. Agents can observe only the evolution of the queue aft...
-
作者:Ke, Shaowei
作者单位:University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要:This paper proposes simple axioms that characterize a generalization of backward induction. At any node of a decision tree, the decision maker looks forward a fixed number of stages perfectly. Beyond that, the decision maker aggregates continuation values according to a function that captures reasoning under unpredictability. The model is uniquely identified from the decision maker's preference over decision trees. Confronting a decision tree, the decision maker iteratively revises her plan fo...