Noise-Tolerant Community Enforcement and the Strength of Small Stakes

By Drew Fudenberg and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2024

We study community enforcement in a large population with noisy monitoring. We focus on equilibria in the prisoner's dilemma that are coordination proof, meaning that matched partners never play a Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium in the one-shot game ind...

Coordination with Differential Time Preferences: Experimental Evidence

By Marina Agranov, Jeongbin Kim, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2024

The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effe...

Beliefs in Repeated Games: An Experiment

By Masaki Aoyagi, Guillaume R. Fréchette, and Sevgi Yuksel

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study beliefs and their relationship to action and strategy choices in finitely and indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games. We find subjects' elicited beliefs about the other player's action are generally...

Scoring Strategic Agents

By Ian Ball

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The sender prefers "hi...

Eliciting Ambiguity with Mixing Bets

By Patrick Schmidt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

Preferences for mixing can reveal ambiguity perception and attitude on a single event. The validity of the approach is discussed for multiple preference classes, including maxmin, maxmax, variational, and smooth second-order preferences. An experimental i...

Testing Mixed-Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer

By P.-A. Chiappori, S. Levitt, and T. Groseclose

American Economic Review, September 2002

Price and Choose

By Federico Echenique and Matías Núñez

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2025

We describe a sequential mechanism that fully implements the set of efficient outcomes in environments with quasi-linear utilities. The mechanism asks agents to take turns in defining prices for each outcome, with a final player choosing an outcome for al...

Bargaining and Information Acquisition

By Kalyan Chatterjee, Miaomiao Dong, and Tetsuya Hoshino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We consider an ultimatum game where the value of the object being sold to the buyer is high or low. The seller knows the value, but the buyer does not. The value to the seller is zero. We introduce the option for the buyer to acquire costly information af...

Cursed Sequential Equilibrium

By Meng-Jhang Fong, Po-Hsuan Lin, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, August 2025

This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multistage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies and imposes sequent...

One, Two, (Three), Infinity, ...: Newspaper and Lab Beauty-Contest Experiments

By Antoni Bosch-Domènech, José G. Montalvo, Rosemarie Nagel, and Albert Satorra

American Economic Review, December 2002

Heterogeneous Noise and Stable Miscoordination

By Srinivas Arigapudi, Yuval Heller, and Amnon Schreiber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Coordination games feature two types of equilibria: pure equilibria, where players successfully coordinate their actions, and mixed equilibria, where players frequently experience miscoordination. We investigate learning dynamics where agents observe the ...

Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of Intentions

By Vincent P. Crawford

American Economic Review, March 2003

Starting from an example of the Allies' decision to feint at Calais and attack Normandy on D-Day, this paper models misrepresentation of intentions to competitors or enemies. Allowing for the possibility of bounded strategic rationality and rational playe...

Market Design: The Policy Uses of Theory

By John McMillan

American Economic Review, May 2003

Economic Behavior in Political Context

By Larry M. Bartels and Henry E. Brady

American Economic Review, May 2003

Inviting political scientists to tell economists how they could do better work is an act of disciplinary generosity. The reality is that contemporary political science is a net importer of ideas and methods from other disciplines, and from none more than ...

Models of Thinking, Learning, and Teaching in Games

By Colin Camerer, Teck Ho, and Kuan Chong

American Economic Review, May 2003

Noncooperative game theory combines strategic thinking, best-response, and mutual consistency of beliefs and choices (equilibrium). Hundreds of experiments show that in actual behavior these three forces are limited, even when subjects are highly motivate...

The Carrot or the Stick: Rewards, Punishments, and Cooperation

By James Andreoni, William Harbaugh, and Lise Vesterlund

American Economic Review, June 2003

When Does Learning in Games Generate Convergence to Nash Equilibria? The Role of Supermodularity in an Experimental Setting

By Yan Chen and Robert Gazzale

American Economic Review, December 2004

This study clarifies the conditions under which learning in games produces convergence to Nash equilibria in practice. We experimentally investigate the role of supermodularity, which is closely related to the more familiar concept of strategic complement...

Dynamic Scoring: An Introduction to the Issues

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2005

Are Two Heads Better Than One? Team versus Individual Play in Signaling Games

By David J. Cooper and John H. Kagel

American Economic Review, June 2005

We compare individuals with two-person teams in signaling game experiments. Teams consistently play more strategically than individuals and generate positive synergies in more difficult games, beating a demanding "truth-wins" norm. The superior performanc...

The Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy: Corrigendum

By N. Gregory Mankiw

American Economic Review, December 2005