Coordination Game

We characterize when network coordination games transition from stable equilibria to cascade-prone configurations. The system exhibits a sharp phase transition at λ 1 (Ā) • φ = χ + δ, where λ 1 (Ā) is the largest eigenvalue of the row-normalized adjacency matrix, φ measures strategic complementarity, and χ + δ captures friction forces. Below this threshold, a unique Nash equilibrium exists with global convergence under any payoff-monotone learning dynamic. Above it, multiple equilibria emerge with the critical configuration being uniquely stochastically stable under mild regularity conditions. We prove the critical configuration is selected by diverse learning processes: best-response dynamics with uniform or logit trembles, fictitious play with O(t-1/2) convergence, regret minimization, and reinforcement learning. For configuration model networks, finite-size analysis reveals the effective threshold scales as (χ + δ)[1 + (⟨k 3 ⟩/⟨k⟩ 3) 1/3 • 2.612 • n-1/3 ]. Welfare analysis yields tight bounds with Price of Anarchy Θ(n) for complete graphs and O(log n) for scale-free networks. We validate predictions on real network data and provide an O(m log n) algorithm for computing critical thresholds. From pandemic control to fintech adoption and cyber-security patching, the threshold delivers a ready-to-use early-warning score for cascade risk in any networked system.

Social situations can be modeled as games with payoff struc- tures. The complexity of the situation emerges from the pattern of pay- offs. Inferring the outcome of the game from the payoff matrix is the conventional approach to describing, predicting or prescribing behaviour of participants. This approach makes a strong assumption of rationality of the players and suffers from other drawbacks as well. While Nash (8) proved a mixed equilibrium always exists, this appealing universality comes at a price. Mixed equilibria are not a natural and credible model of decision-making behaviour. Indeed, it has been shown that efficient algorithms to compute mixed equilibria likely do not exist for all games. (3) The pure Nash equilibrium, a more appealing model of behaviour, fails on universality: a subset of games - and a growing proportion as the number of players and choices increases - do not possess a pure Nash equilibrium. Miller (5),(6) describes unpublished research in which he took a ...

We report on the improvements that can be achieved by applying machine learning techniques, in particular reinforcement learning, for the dynamic load balancing of parallel applications. The applications being considered in this paper are coarse grain data intensive applications. Such applications put high pressure on the interconnect of the hardware. Synchronization and load balancing in complex, heterogeneous networks need fast, flexible, adaptive load balancing algorithms. Viewing a parallel application as a one-state coordination game in the framework of multi-agent reinforcement learning, and by using a recently introduced multi-agent exploration technique, we are able to improve upon the classic job farming approach. The improvements are achieved with limited computation and communication overhead.

We thank participants at the Bogotá Experimental Economics Seminar (BEBES), at the 2nd Taller de Economía Experimental (TALEX) at Universidad del Rosario in 2019, at the NOBEC seminar at UPENN and at REXCON21 Conference. We also thank Laura Jiménez and Diego Sebastián Ramírez for assistance conducting experimental sessions and Yaritza Zambrano for outstanding research assistance. Aycinena would like to acknowledge financial support from the program "Inclusión productiva y social: programas y políticas para la promoción de una economía formal", #60185, which conforms the Alianza EFI -Economía Formal Inclusiva, under the Contingent Recovery Contract No. FP44842-220-2018.

This paper examines the mechanisms of persuasion used in the recruitment and retention of members in high-control groups (commonly referred to as "sects" or "cults") through the lens of game theory. The analysis integrates empirical literature on psychological manipulation processes-particularly the Submission As Preference Shifting model (Corvaglia, 2025)-with formal models of strategic interaction, highlighting how recruitment dynamics can be conceptualized as games of asymmetric information, strategic signaling, and social influence. The proposed theoretical framework provides new insights into individual vulnerability factors, recruiters' strategies, and possible preventive interventions.

Dame has built an international reputation by bringing the best of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry to bear on democratization, human development, and other research themes relevant to contemporary societies around the world. Together, more than 100 faculty and visiting fellows as well as both graduate and undergraduate students make up the Kellogg community of scholars. Founded in 1982, the Institute promotes research, provides students with exceptional educational opportunities, and builds linkages across campus and around the world. The Kellogg Working Paper Series: n Shares work-in-progress in a timely way before final publication in scholarly books and journals n Includes peer-reviewed papers by visiting and faculty fellows of the Institute n Includes a Web database of texts and abstracts in English and Spanish or Portuguese n Is indexed chronologically, by region and by research theme, and by author n Most full manuscripts downloadable from kellogg.nd.edu

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method has been widely used in practice since the 1950's in areas such as biology, statistics, and physics. However, it is only in the last few decades that powerful techniques for obtaining rigorous performance guarantees with respect to the running time have been developed. Today, with only a few notable exceptions, most known algorithms for approximately uniform sampling and approximate counting rely on the MCMC method. This thesis focuses on algorithms that use MCMC combined with an algorithm from optimization called simulated annealing, for sampling and counting problems. Annealing is a heuristic for finding the global optimum of a function over a large search space. It has recently emerged as a powerful technique used in conjunction with the MCMC method for sampling problems, for example in the estimation of the permanent and in algorithms for computing the volume of a convex body. We examine other applications of annealing to sampling problems as well as scenarios when it fails to converge in polynomial time. We consider the problem of randomly generating 0-1 contingency tables. This is a well-studied problem in statistics, as well as the theory of random graphs, since it is also equivalent to generating a random bipartite graph with a prescribed degree sequence. Previously, the only algorithm known for all degree sequences was by reduction to approximating the permanent of a 0-1 matrix. We give a direct and more efficient combinatorial algorithm which relies on simulated annealing. An interesting aspect of the annealing algorithm we define is that the high temperature distribution for the annealing is defined algorithmically. Simulated tempering is a variant of annealing used for sampling in which a temperature parameter is randomly raised or lowered during the simulation. The idea is that by extending the state space of the Markov chain to a polynomial number of progressively smoother distributions, parameterized by temperature, the chain could cross bottlenecks in ix the original space which cause slow mixing. The conventional wisdom is that tempering could speed up the convergence time exponentially, or at worst, it could be slower by at most a polynomial in the number of distributions. We first show that simulated tempering mixes torpidly for the 3-state ferromagnetic Potts model on the complete graph. The torpid mixing is caused by a first order phase transition, a fundamental difference in the behavior of this model from the Ising model, for which simulated tempering is known to converge at all temperatures. Moreover, we disprove the conventional belief and show that simulated tempering can converge at a rate that is slower than the algorithm at a fixed temperature by at least an exponential factor. x

We consider the class of symmetric two-player games that have the property that for any mixed strategy of the opponent, a player's best responses are included in the support of this mixed strategy-the total bandwagon or coordination property (CP). We show that for any number of pure strategies n, a symmetric two-player game has CP if and only if the game has 2 n -1 symmetric Nash equilibria. In view of the importance of 1/2-dominance as an equilibrium selection criterion, we show that if in addition to CP a game is supermodular, it will always have a 1/2-dominant equilibrium, and the 1/2-dominant equilibrium will be either the lowest or the highest strategy profile. Furthermore we show that if a game with CP has a unique potential maximizer, it will be equivalent to a 1/2-dominant equilibrium. As a specific application, we consider the minimum-effort game and reexamine the experimental equilibrium selection result of to compare it with the theoretical prediction. Our results allow us to give a new insight into an aspect of the experiment that so far could not be explained.

the scope of the paper is to review the literature that employs coordination games to study social norms and conventions from the viewpoint of game theory and cognitive psychology. We claim that those two alternative approaches are in fact complementary, as they provide different insights to explain how people converge to a unique system of self-fulfilling expectations in presence of multiple, equally viable, conventions. While game theory explains the emergence of conventions relying on efficiency and risk considerations, the psychological view is more concerned with frame and labeling effects. the interaction between these alternative (and, sometimes, competing) effects leads to the result that coordination failures may well occur and, even when coordination takes place, there is no guarantee that the convention eventually established will be the most efficient.

This paper analyzes the equilibrium play in a random matching model with a changing environment. Under myopic decision making, players adopt imitation strategies similar to those observed in evolutionary models with sampling from past play in the population. If the players are patient, equilibrium strategies display elements of experimentation in addition to imitation. If the changes in the environment are infrequent enough, these strategies succeed in coordinating almost all of the players on the dominant action almost all of the time. The myopic rules, on the other hand, result in mis-coordination for a positive fraction of time.

This paper studies a model of strategic communication by an informed and upwardly biased sender to one or more receivers. Applications include situations in which (i) it is costly for the sender to misrepresent information, due to legal, technological, or moral constraints, or (ii) receivers may be credulous and blindly believe the sender's recommendation. In contrast to the predictions obtained in Crawford and Sobel's [9] benchmark cheap talk model, our model admits a fully separating equilibrium, provided that the state space is unbounded above. The language used in equilibrium is inflated and naive receivers are deceived.

Significant prior research has shown that facilitation is a critical part of GSS transition. This study examines an under-researched aspect of facilitation-its contributions to self-sustained GSS use among group members. Integrating insights from Adaptive Structuration Theory, experimental economics, and the Collaboration Engineering literature, we formalize interactions of group members in GSS transition as strategic interactions in a minimum-effort coordination game. The contributions of facilitation are interpreted as coordination mechanisms to help group members achieve and maintain an agreement on GSS use by reducing uncertainties in the coordination game. We implement the conjectured coordination mechanisms in a multi-agent simulator. The simulator offers insights into the separate and combined effects of common facilitation practices during the lifecycle of GSS transition. These insights can help the Collaboration Engineering community to identify and package the facilitation routines that are critical for group members to achieve self-sustained GSS use and understand how facilitation routines should be adapted to different stages of GSS transition lifecycle. Moreover, they indicate the value of the multi-agent approach in uncovering new insights and representing the issue of GSS transition with a new view.

Uncertainty in the form of risk or ambiguity can arise from the interaction with nature and other players, while strategic uncertainty arises only in interactions with others. Here, we systematically compare binary decisions between a safe option and a potentially higher paying but uncertain option in four experimental conditions with the same potential monetary outcomes: coordination vs. anti coordination games, as well as risky and ambiguous lotteries. In each condition, we progressively increase the value of the safe option and measure subjects' certainty equivalents (i.e., the specific safe payoff-threshold that makes a subject indifferent between the two options). We find that anti-coordination games and ambiguous lotteries elicit equally high aversion to uncertainty, relative to the other domains. In spite of this similarity, we find that subjects alternate between the safe and uncertain options much more frequently, thus displaying higher entropy, under anti-coordination ...

From the 9th of November to the 14th of November 2008 the Dagstuhl Seminar 08461 Planning in Multiagent Systems was held in Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The rst section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available.

Constraints on practice can benefit motor learning by guiding the learner towards efficient coordination patterns, but can also narrow the potential solution space of coordination and control. The aim of this paper was to investigate whether narrowing the solution space through more restrictive task constraints limits the expression of potential exploratory behaviours during the learning process, identified using Drifting Markov Models. In a breaststroke swimming task, the change in interlimb coordination of 7 learners practicing for 16 lessons over 2 months was analysed to quantify motor exploration and identify periods of metastable regimes of coordination. Results showed that the observed exploratory dynamics were highly individual both in terms of range of exploration and in the patterns of search. The more restrictive task constraints did not impair the amount of exploration but rather channelled the exploration around a few selected patterns. In addition, restraining the nature of the exploratory process increased the inter-individual differences of the learning rate. Although manipulating the task constraints during learning can help learners to escape from the behavioural consequences of their intrinsic dynamics, maintaining a broad solution space for a diversity of coordination patterns to emerge was key to fostering effective exploration of individual coordination solutions.

Constraints on practice can benefit motor learning by guiding the learner towards efficient coordination patterns, but can also narrow the potential solution space of coordination and control. The aim of this paper was to investigate whether narrowing the solution space through more restrictive task constraints limits the expression of potential exploratory behaviours during the learning process, identified using Drifting Markov Models. The change in interlimb coordination of 7 learners practicing for 16 lessons over 2 months was analysed to quantify motor exploration and identify periods of metastable regimes of coordination. Results showed that the observed exploratory dynamics were highly individual both in terms of range of exploration and in the patterns of search. The more restrictive task constraints did not impair the range of exploration but rather channelled the exploration around a few selected patterns. In addition, restraining the nature of the exploratory process incre...

Economic theories of legal compliance emphasize legal sanctions, while psychological and sociological theories stress the perceived legitimacy of law. Without disputing the importance of either mechanism, we test a third way that law affects behavior, an expressive theory that claims law influences behavior by creating a focal point around which individuals coordinate. The focal point theory makes three claims: (1) that the need for coordination is pervasive because "mixed motive" games involving coordination model common disputes; (2) that law, by publicly endorsing a particular equilibrium, tends to call the players' attention to that outcome; and (3) that, in such games, any third-party cheap talk that calls the players' attention to a particular equilibrium tends to produce that equilibrium. After explaining the first and second claim, we offer an experimental test of the third. Specifically, we investigated how various forms of third party cheap talk influence the behavior of subjects in a Hawk/Dove or Chicken game. Despite the players' conflicting interests, we found that messages highlighting an equilibrium tend to produce that outcome. Most striking, this result emerged even when the message was selected by an overtly random, mechanical process. We obtained a similar result when the message was delivered by a third-party subject; the latter effect was significantly stronger than the former only when the subject speaker was selected by a merit-based process. These results suggest that, in certain circumstances, law generates compliance not only by sanctions and legitimacy, but also by facilitating coordination around a focal outcome. For their comments on an earlier draft, the authors thank Rachel Croson, Dhammika Dharmapala, Shari Diamond, Tom Ginsburg, Tom Miles, Jeff Rachlinsky, Larry Ribstein, Tom Ulen, members of the research committees of the American Bar Foundation, and the participants at law faculty workshops at Connecticut, Florida State, Northwestern, and Virginia and at the law and economics workshop at Michigan and Southern California. We also thank Emily Solberg for research assistance. We thank the American Bar Foundation,

Uncertainty in the form of risk or ambiguity can arise from the interaction with nature and other players, while strategic uncertainty arises only in interactions with others. Here, we systematically compare binary decisions between a safe option and a potentially higher paying but uncertain option in four experimental conditions with the same potential monetary outcomes: coordination vs. anti coordination games, as well as risky and ambiguous lotteries. In each condition, we progressively increase the value of the safe option and measure subjects' certainty equivalents (i.e., the specific safe payoff-threshold that makes a subject indifferent between the two options). We find that anti-coordination games and ambiguous lotteries elicit equally high aversion to uncertainty, relative to the other domains. In spite of this similarity, we find that subjects alternate between the safe and uncertain options much more frequently, thus displaying higher entropy, under anti-coordination ...

Social interactions arguably provide a rationale for several important phenomena, from smoking and other risky behavior in teens to peer effects in school performance. We study social interactions in dynamic economies. For these economies, we provide existence (Markov Perfect Equilibrium in pure strategies), ergodicity, and welfare results. We characterize several equilibrium properties of policy functions, spatial correlations, and social multiplier effects. Most importantly, we study formally the issue of the identification of social interactions, emphasizing the restrictions imposed by dynamic equilibrium conditions with respect to economies populated by myopic agents and economies in which spatial correlation is induced by selection.

De nombreux problèmes de prise de décision séquentielle sont résolus efficacement en exploitant le principe d'optimalité de Bellman, c'est-à-dire l'imbrication récursive de sous-problèmes dans le problème original. Nous montrons ici qu'il peut être appliqué aux jeux stochastiques partiellement observables à 2 joueurs et somme nulle (zs-POSG) en (i) prenant le point de vue d'un planificateur central, qui ne peut raisonner que sur une statistique suffisante appelée état d'occupation, et (ii) transformant de tels problèmes en des jeux de Markov dans l'espace des «états d'occupation» à somme nulle (zs-OMG). Ensuite, en exploitant des propriétés de Lipschitz-continuité de la fonction de valeur optimale, on peut dériver une version de l'algorithme HSVI (Heuristic Search Value Iteration) qui trouve un -équilibre de Nash en temps fini.

Dans divers types de problemes, par exemple de prise de decision sequentielle, les algorithmes de recherche heuristique permettent d'exploiter la connaissance d'une situation initiale et d'une heuristique admissible pour rechercher efficacement une solution optimale. De tels algorithmes existent y compris en cas de dynamique incertaine, d'observabilite partielle, de criteres multiples, ou d'agents multiples collaborant. Nous proposons ici un algorithme de recherche heuristique pour jeux stochastiques a deux joueurs et a somme nulle, et avec critere decompte, algorithme reposant sur HSVI—donc sur la generation de trajectoires. Nous demontrons que, chaque joueur agissant de maniere optimiste, et en employant des initialisations heuristiques simples, l'algorithme obtenu converge vers une solution-optimale en temps fini.

This paper examines the role of policy in coordination environments such as currency crises and bank runs by introducing signaling in a global game. While exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium, we show that the endogenous information generated by policy interventions leads to multiple equilibria. Multiplicity obtains even in environments where the policy is observed with idiosyncratic noise. It is sustained by the agents coordinating on different interpretations of, and different reactions to, the same policy choices. The policy maker is thus trapped into a position where self-fulfilling expectations dictate not only the coordination outcome but also the optimal policy.

In this paper, we simplify the coordination control approach by removing the supervisor for the coordinator from the closed-loop system and relax the restrictions placed on a coordinator. This relaxation results in the simplification of the whole coordination control framework, including the notions of conditional controllability, conditional observability, and conditional normality. Compared to our previous work, the role of the supervisor on a coordinator alphabet is postponed until the final stage of the coordination control synthesis. This completes and clarifies our previous results, while all the fundamental theorems remain valid in the relaxed framework. Unlike previous approaches we can always compute a conditionally controllable sublanguage without any restricting conditions we have used before.

We introduce a new type of agent whom we refer to as a "problem solver" (PS). The PS interacts with conventional players and wishes to respond optimally to their moves. The PS has only partial information about the moves of the other players. Unlike a regular player, the PS does not "put himself in the shoes" of other players and does not form beliefs about their moves. Rather, he treats the data as a logic puzzle: he calculates the set of possible configurations of moves that are consistent with the data he observes and responds to it. We insert such a problem solver into a simple model of competition for attention and analyze its equilibria. We demonstrate a novel feature of equilibrium in the model, whereby even though the PS always succeeds in his task, he may be uncertain that he will do so.

describes the development of cooperation within exchange relationships as a slow process, starting with minor transactions in which little trust is required because little risk is involved, and eventually expanding into much riskier situations that require significantly higher levels of trust to generate cooperative behavior. If this sort of trust-building works, it does so because a counterpart's behavior in the less risky situation serves as a precedent for his or her behavior in the riskier situation. Since organizations are complex webs of exchange relationships , these precedent effects are important in organizational environments. In this paper, we use game theory to formalize how cooperative relationships develop through precedents. Then we run experiments to see whether a precedent of efficient play in a coordination game will raise the level of cooperative behavior in a finite horizon prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. We first illustrate our idea with a simple example, and later present the more complex games used in the experiments. Consider the PD game and the coordination game displayed in Tables and. (The upper left payoff in each cell is the row player's payoff; the lower right payoff is the column player's payoff.) The "efficient" outcome is the one which is unambiguously better for both players. In both games efficient outcome occurs when both players select C (cooperate). However, in the PD game it is a dominant strategy to play D (defect); individually rational players who are trying to maximize their own payoffs will both choose D, leaving both players worse off. In the coordination game, in contrast, choosing C is a best response to an expectation of C; so if one player expects the other to cooperate (with sufficiently high probability) then she will cooperate, and both player are better off. In the language of game theory, the efficient (C,C)

In the lowest unique positive integer (LUPI) game, players pick positive integers and the player who chose the lowest unique number (not chosen by anyone else) wins a …xed prize. We derive theoretical equilibrium predictions, assuming fully rational players with Poisson-distributed uncertainty about the number of players. We also derive predictions for boundedly rational players using quantal response equilibrium and a cognitive hierarchy of rationality steps with quantal responses. The theoretical predictions are tested using both …eld data from a Swedish gambling company, and laboratory data from a scaled-down version of the …eld game. The …eld and lab data show similar patterns: in early rounds, players choose very low and very high numbers too often, and avoid focal ("round") numbers. However, there is some learning and a surprising degree of convergence toward equilibrium. The cognitive hierarchy model with quantal responses can account for the basic discrepancies between the equilibrium prediction and the data.

We experimentally investigate the effect on efficiency of pre-bargaining communication in a multilateral majoritarian bargaining game with joint production under two conditions: observable and unobservable productive investments. In both conditions, communication mainly fosters fair sharing and is rarely used by proposers to pit voters against each other. A virtuous cycle of proportional surplus sharing arises in treatments with observable investments regardless of whether communication is possible leading to high efficiency gains over time. In the absence of investment observability, communication is widely used by subjects to truthfully report their investments, which coupled with calls for equitable sharing, allows for substantial efficiency gains. These results contrast sharply with previous findings on bargaining over an exogenous fund where communication leads to highly unequal outcomes, competitive messages, and virtually no calls for fair sharing.

We consider competition between non-cooperative mobiles over several independent collision multiple-access channels or more generally, over interference channels. A mobile selects one of the channels for transmission; if the same channel is chosen simultaneously by more than a single mobile then a collision occurs and the colliding packets are lost. Policies based on assigning each independent channel to another mobile turn out to constitute efficient equilibria. But they request some synchronization and coordination which may not be possible. We identify other mixed equilibria that do not request synchronization but exhibit innefficiency. Moreover, we show that a Braess type paradox occurs in which the availability of more resources results in poorer performance to all mobiles. We extend the model to investigate the influence of capture phenomena.

In this work, an integrated Game Theory (GT) approach is developed for the coordination of multienterprise Supply Chains (SCs) in a competitive uncertain environment. The conflicting goals of the different participants are solved through coordination contracts using a non-cooperative non-zero-sum Stackelberg game under the leadership of the manufacturer. The Stackelberg payoff matrix is built under the nominal conditions, and then evaluated under different probable uncertain scenarios using a Monte-Carlo simulation. The competition between the Stackelberg game players and the third parties is solved through a Nash Equilibrium game. A novel way to analyze the game outcome is proposed based on a win-win Stackelberg set of "Pareto-frontiers". The benefits of the resulting MINLP tactical models are illustrated by a case study with different vendors around a client SC. The results show that coordinated decisions lead to higher expected payoffs compared to the standalone case, while also leading to uncertainty reduction.

Large-scale effects of locally interacting agents are called emergent properties of the system. Emergent properties are often surprising because it can be hard to anticipate the full consequences of even simple forms of interaction. In this paper we address the following questions: how do heterogeneous agents generate emergent coordination, and how do they manage and self-organize macroscopic orders from bottom up without any central authority? These questions will depend crucially on how they interact and adapt their behavior. Agents myopically evolve their behavior based on the threshold rule, which is given as the function of the collective behavior and their idiosyncratic utilities. We obtain the micro-macro dynamics that relate the aggregate behavior with the underlying individual behavior. We show that agents' rational behavior reflecting their micromotives combined with the behavior of others produce stable orders, and sometimes unanticipated cyclic behavior. We consider ...

There are growing interests for studying collective behavior including the dynamics of markets, the emergence of social norms and conventions, and collective phenomena in daily life such as traffic congestion. In this paper, we focus on scale-free network and investigate the effect of number of interaction on collective behavior. In this paper, we found that collective behavior is affected in the structure of the social network and theta and the collective behavior was stochastic. Moreover, collective behavior is almost same as Schelling model, though the decision is not interactive and simultaneously. Then, we found that the collective behavior in Schelling model is similar to cascade model. That is, our results with heterogeneous rules or heterogeneous networks are possible to apply for cascade model. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Program Committee of IES2013.

In many situations, such as trade in stock exchanges, agents have many opportunities to act within a short interval of time. The agents in such situations can often coordinate their actions in advance, but coordination during the game consumes too much time. An equilibrium in such situations has to be sequential in order to handle mistakes made by players. In this paper, we present a new solution concept for infinite-horizon dynamic games, which is appropriate for such situations: a sequential normal-form correlated approximate equilibrium. Under additional assumptions, we show that every such game admits this kind of equilibrium.

An equilibrium is communication-proof if it is unaffected by new opportunities to communicate and renegotiate. We characterize the set of equilibria of coordination games with preplay communication in which players have private preferences over the coordinated outcomes. The set of communication-proof equilibria is a small and relatively homogeneous subset of the set of qualitatively diverse Bayesian Nash equilibria. Under a communication-proof equilibrium, players never miscoordinate, play their jointly preferred outcome whenever there is one, and communicate only the ordinal part of their preferences. Moreover, such equilibria are robust to changes in players' beliefs and interim Pareto efficient.

An equilibrium is communication-proof if it is unaffected by new opportunities to communicate and renegotiate. We characterize the set of equilibria of coordination games with pre-play communication in which players have private preferences over the feasible coordinated outcomes. Communication-proof equilibria provide a narrow selection from the large set of qualitatively diverse Bayesian Nash equilibria in such games. Under a communication-proof equilibrium, players never miscoordinate, play their jointly preferred outcome whenever there is one, and communicate only the ordinal part of their preferences. Moreover, such equilibria are robust to changes in players' beliefs, interim Pareto efficient, and evolutionarily stable.

This paper presents a modified overcurrent protection system to overcome the break points of a parallel distribution feeder protection. For realizing an appropriate protection setting, two concepts are introduced, and their performance is evaluated. These concepts are the adaptive coordination exploiting smart grid information and the modified coordination methods. The modified coordination is adjusted with changing of the contemporary worst fault point. A comparative study is done between the adaptive, modified, and conventional coordination concepts. For investigation purposes, a 11 kV distribution feeder is modelled using the Matlab/Simulink package. The results provide evidence of the efficacy of the proposed modified coordination concept for parallel distribution feeders.

The impact of the cardinal relationships amongpecuniary payoffs, and of social history and reputation, on thechoice of strategies in four one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games isexperimentally examined. The results suggest that normalized payoffvalues linked to ``fear'' and ``greed'' are important as predictorsof behavior in the PD games. Success in coordinating on the payoffdominant equilibrium in previous plays of coordination games alsoincreases

This paper presents results from a series of experiments designed to test the impact on subject behavior of changes in the risk dominance and payoff dominance characteristics of two player coordination games. The main finding is that changes in risk dominance significantly affect play of the subjects, whereas changes in the level of payoff dominance do not. Observed history of play also has an important influence on subject behavior, both when subjects are randomly rematched after each game and when they remain matched with the same individual for a sequence of games.

Groups such as committees or boards make many important decisions within organizations. Many of these decisions affect external parties. This paper uses an experimental approach to study how the gender composition of three-person groups affects choices and beliefs in a coordination game with selfish and prosocial equilibria. We find that women are more willing to choose the prosocial option. Both men and women believe that women will make choices that are kinder to external parties, in line with the observed difference in prosocial choices across genders. Analysis of the chat communications reveals that women express more concerns for others' welfare and mention money less often. These results have implications for public policies intended to increase gender diversity and women's representation on decision-making committees in the corporate sector, in politics, and in academia.

The theory of cheap talk, evaluated as a model of language use, is shown to mismatch the reality of communication in five respects: real talk is conflict dampening, is more than assertion, is dear, is not literal, and is beholden to its medium. The linguistic theory of pragmatics is employed to demonstrate formally that every utterance creates a coordination game whose resolution reveals evidence of similarity and of a shared mental model, so there is no neutral style of communication: an utterance must affect the relationship between the players. This alteration, in turn, will affect any game allowing for communication.

I consider a flexible framework of strategic interactions under incomplete information in which, prior to committing their actions (consumption, production, or investment decisions), agents choose the attention to allocate to an arbitrarily large number of information sources about the primitive events that are responsible for the incompleteness of information (the exogenous fundamentals). The analysis sheds light on what type of payoff interdependencies contribute to inefficiency in the allocation of attention. The results for the case of perfect recall (in which the agents remember the influence of each source on their posterior beliefs) are compared to those for the case of bounded recall (in which posterior beliefs about the underlying fundamentals are consistent with Bayesian updating, but in which the agents are unable to keep track of the influence of individual sources on their posterior beliefs).

A careful reading of recent scholarship on the early history of international taxation, especially on the League of Nations' work on "double taxation," ought to have dislodged many myths about this history. But more often than not, such scholarship is taken to offer mere details without altering our fundamental understanding. This paper suggests that this reception reflects a longstanding pattern in discourses about international taxation: participants perpetuate or cling onto narratives that are easily shown to be false. The paper exposes this pattern by summarizing evidence for four rarely-acknowledged conclusions about the League's output on international taxation. First, rather than advancing any agreed proposal, the 1923 "Four Economists Report" reflected fundamental disagreements (in both theory and practice) between the world's then two leading capital exporters, the U.S. and Britain. Second, the League's 1925 Technical Experts Report substantially changed the topic from the Four Economists Report. By focusing on coordination conventions among countries imposing only source-based taxation, it offered little of interest to the U.S. and Britain, and rendered international agreement even more difficult by conflating distinct policy issues. Meanwhile, it launched an institutional narrative that, whatever the problems of international taxation were, the League offered relevant solutions. Third, this narrative began to allow lobbyists like Mitchell Carroll to advance business interests under the League's disguise in the 1930s. Fourth, by the time of the Mexico Model, "the League's" double taxation work served little more than narrow institutional and personal interests. In each of these last three stages of the League's work, despite the lack of genuine intellectual continuity, parties appealed to earlier League outputs to legitimize their own (often questionable) pursuits. This practice continued in the activities of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation in the 1950s, and one suspects that it is even more significant today. The paper suggests that the durability of this practice may be attributable to both ambiguous principal-agent relationships in the context of weak international organizations sponsoring informal norm setting, and persistent intellectual confusion about the subject of international taxation.

Games derived from experimental economics can be used to directly compare decision-making behavior across primate species, including humans. For example, the use of coordination games, such as the Assurance game, has shown that a variety of primate species can coordinate; however, the mechanism by which they do so appears to differ across species. Recently, these games have been extended to explore anti-coordination and cooperation in monkeys, with evidence that they play the Nash equilibria in sequential games in these other contexts. In the current paper, we use the same methods to explore chimpanzees' behavior in the Assurance Game; an anti-coordination game, the Hawk Dove game; and a cooperation game with a temptation to defect, the Prisoner's Dilemma game. We predicted that they would consistently play the Nash equilibria, as do the monkeys, and that, as in previous work, the subjects' level of experience with cognitive experiments would impact performance. Surprisingly, few of our pairs consistently played the same outcome (i.e., no statistically significant preferences), although those who did showed evidence consistent with Nash equilibria play, the same pattern seen more consistently in the monkeys. We consider reasons for their inconsistent performance; for instance, perhaps it was due to lack of interest in a task that rewarded them almost every trial no matter what option they chose, although this does not explain why they were inconsistent when the monkeys were not. A second goal of our study was to ascertain the effects of exogenous oxytocin in their decision making in one population. In line with recent work showing complex effects of oxytocin on social behavior, we found no effect on subjects' outcomes. We consider possible explanations for this as well.

The problem of the existence of Berge equilibria in the sense of Zhukovskii in normal-form finite games in pure and in mixed strategies is studied. The example of a three-player game that has Berge equilibrium neither in pure, nor in mixed strategies is given.

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