Search Results
Working Paper
Dynamic games with hidden actions and hidden states
We consider the large class of dynamic games in which each player?s actions are unobservable to the other players, and each player?s actions can influence a state variable that is unobservable to the other players. We develop an algorithm that solves for the subset of sequential equilibria in which equilibrium strategies are Markov in the privately observed state.
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Settlement delays in the money market
We track 38,000 money market trades from execution to delivery and return to provide a first empirical analysis of settlement delays in financial markets. In line with predictions from recent models showing that financial claims are settled strategically, we document a tendency by lenders to delay delivery of loaned funds until the afternoon hours. We find that banks follow a simple strategy to manage the risk of account overdrafts - delaying the settlement of large payments relative to that of small payments. More sophisticated strategies, such as increasing settlement delays when own liquid ...
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Sustainable plans
We propose a definition of time consistent policy for infinite horizon economies with competitive private agents. Allocations and policies are defined as functions of the history of past policies. A sustainable equilibrium is a sequence of history-contingent policies and allocations that satisfy certain sequential rationality conditions for the government and for private agents. We provide a complete characterization of the sustainable equilibrium outcomes for a variant of Fischer?s (1980) model of capital taxation. We also relate our work to recent developments in the theory of repeated ...
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Efficient non-contractible investments
This paper addresses the question of whether agents will invest efficiently in attributes that will increase their productivity in subsequent matches with other individuals. We present a two-sided matching model in which buyers and sellers make investment decisions prior to a matching stage. Once matched, the buyer and seller bargain over the transfer price. In contrast to most matching models, preferences over possible matches are affected by decisions made before the matching process. We show that if bargaining respects the existence of outside options (in the sense that the resulting ...
Working Paper
Corporate board composition, protocols, and voting behavior: experimental evidence
We model experimentally the governance of an institution. The optimal management of this institution depends on the information possessed by insiders. However, insiders, whose interests are not aligned with the interests of the institution, may choose to use their information to further personal rather than institutional ends. Researchers (e.g., Palfrey 1990) and the business press have both argued that multiagent mechanisms, which inject trustworthy but uninformed ?watchdog? agents into the governance process and impose penalties for conflicting recommendations, can implement institutionally ...
Working Paper
Minimally acceptable altruism and the ultimatum game
I suppose that people react with anger when others show themselves not to be minimally altruistic. With heterogeneous agents, this can account for the experimental results of ultimatum and dictator games. Moreover, it can account for the surprisingly large fraction of individuals who offer an even split, with parameter values that are more plausible than those required to explain outcomes in these experiments with the models of Levine (1998), Fehr and Schmidt (1999), Dickinson (2000), and Bolton and Ockenfels (2000).
Working Paper
Protection and retaliation: changing the rules of the game
An examination of the macroeconomic, political, and institutional environment of the 1930s and the 1980s suggests a set of stylized facts associated with periods of trade tension and incidents of trade retaliation. Periods of macroeconomic stress precipitate changes in the conduct of and implementation of U.S. trade policy, which then can lead to escalating trade tension, protectionist measures, and perhaps retaliation. Macroeconomic stress, especially when linked to external events, decreases the political benefits of following a liberal trade policy and changes the economic consequences of ...
Working Paper
On policy interactions among nations: when do cooperation and commitment matter?
This paper offers a framework to study commitment and cooperation issues in games with multiple policymakers. To reconcile some puzzles in the recent literature on the nature of policy interactions among nations, we prove that games characterized by different commitment and cooperation schemes can admit the same equilibrium outcome if certain spillover effects vanish at the common solution of these games. We provide a detailed discussion of these spillovers, showing that, in general, commitment and cooperation are nontrivial issues. Yet in linear-quadratic models with multiple policymakers, ...
Working Paper
Codes of conduct, private information, and repeated games
We examine self-referential games in which there is a chance of understanding an opponent?s intentions. Our main focus is on the interaction of two sources of information about opponents? play: direct observation of the opponent?s code-of-conduct, and indirect observation of the opponent?s play in a repeated setting.
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Dynamic bargaining theory
The goal of this paper is to extend the analysis of strategic bargaining to nonstationary environments, where preferences or opportunities may be changing over time. We are mainly interested in equilibria where trade occurs immediately, once the agents start negotiating, but the terms of trade depend on when the negotiations begin. We characterize equilibria in terms of simply dynamical systems, and compare these outcomes with the myopic Nash bargaining solution. We illustrate the practicality of the approach with an application in monetary economics.