This thesis is composed of three chapters, which can be read independently. In the first one, we present and solve some bargaining games a la Rubinstein, where the subjects can delegate the negotiating process to agents. Delegation is aimed to provide the delegating party with a higher bargaining power. When both parties delegate, uncertainty arises about the final distribution of the payoffs and multiple equilibria are possible. The seller loses his usual first mover's advantage. When we allow for delegation costs, the range of multiple equilibria shrinks. the final outcome of the game may be now inefficient for the principals and a prisoners' dilemma may arise. In the second chapter, we develop a model of simultaneous and sequential voting in a committee where members do not share their private information and do not have the same preferences. When objective functions differ, an optimal order of voting in the sequential game is found, leading to a unique socially optimal equilibrium. Our result rationalizes the presence of biased (i.e. partisan) voters in small committees as a way of reaching social optimality. Finally, in the third chapter, we acknowledge that, beside the traditional public-private dichotomy for the provision of public services, an increasing attention has been devoted to the use of partnerships. We compare relative inefficiencies of public provision, traditional private provision and PPPs. We also analyze the effect of workers' efforts and incentives on the success of the device.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-107). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

<b>Duelling</b> The norm of duelling endured for hundreds of years in Europe. In the United Kingdom it disappeared abruptly in the mid-nineteenth century, whereas in France it declined slowly. I present a simple model of social norms that explains these phenomena. The model predicts that the evolution of norms is characterised by tipping, whereby norms can shift suddenly due to shocks, and by a ratchet effect, whereby changes in parameters can cause norms to decline gradually. I show that the model can be supported by an equilibrium of a repeated game, with no special assumptions about preferences. <b>Community enforcement using modal actions</b> I prove two folk theorems for repeated games with random matching. A large group of players is rematched at random each period, so that players who deviate must be sanctioned by third parties. Previous analyses have either relied on strong assumptions about information transmission, or have been limited to equilibria that are not robust to noise or in which players are indifferent. I use a simple construction based on modal actions to obtain results for strict and robust equilibria. <b>Learning repeated-game strategies</b> The literature on boundedly rational learning has tended to focus on stagegame actions. I present a stochastic learning rule for repeated-game strategies. Players form beliefs about their opponent’s strategy based on past actions and best-respond. Occasionally, they make mistakes and experiment, and I show that the equilibrium selected depends on exactly how players make mistakes. Simple specifications of the learning rule yield intuitive selection results: the maxmin, or Rawlsian, outcome; the Nash bargaining solution; the maximum of the sum of payoffs; and a generalisation of risk dominance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis is concerned with game-theoretic models of oligopoly resource markets. They revolve around an open market, on which a number of firms sell a common resource. The market price-demand relationship means that the price (demand) that results from the firm’s production (pricing) decisions is a function of the decisions of all firms selling to that market. This means that firms must generally anticipate the actions of competing firms when determining their own strategies, which means that these models often need to be analysed using game theory. We focus on games in which the resource is exhaustible, with the exception of Chapter 5, in which the majority of the analysis is carried out in an inexhaustible resources setting. Exhaustibility introduces an additional complication into these games; that of allocating the extraction and sale of a limited resource pool over time. We consider several separate areas of extension, which we outline below. In Chapter 2, we consider a dynamic Stackelberg game. Stackelberg competition is an asymmetric form of competition in which one player (the leader) has the ability to pre-commit to and announce a strategy in advance. The ability to pre-commit to a strategy is almost always highly valuable, and in this case allows the leader to drive down the follower’s production by pre-committing to drive up their own. We follow the framework used in [62] to analyse Cournot competition to derive our results. In Chapter 3, we compare the two settings in which resource extraction models are usually formulated: Open-Loop, in which the players determine their strategies as functions of time and the initial resource levels of the players only; and Feedback-Loop, in which the players determine their strategies at each point in time as a function of the current resource levels at that time. Our focus is on the investigation of the relationship between the difference in the production or value of a firm under these two models, and the distribution of resources across the firms. In Chapter 4, we consider a common property resource game. These involve multiple firms which can extract from a common resource pool. We study a widely-used Open- viii Loop model, as formulated in [79]. We examine the result that analysis of the problem by standard methods results in two candidate equilibria, and argue that one of these equilibria can be ruled out by construction of a superior response. In Chapter 5, we analyse joint constraints on production, namely constraints which are met when the total production is above or below a certain level. It is a well- established result that these constraints can result in multiple equilibria. We provide several brief extensions to existing uniqueness results. We also demonstrate methods by which these results can be utilised to analyse games with piecewise-linear windfall taxes or congestion charges. Finally, we discuss the problems of extending these results to games with resource exhaustibility.

In an interval society, voters are represented by intervals on the real line, corresponding to their approval sets on a linear political spectrum. I imagine the society to be a representative democracy, and ask how to choose members of the society as representatives. Following work in mathematical psychology by Coombs and others, I develop a measure of the compatibility (political similarity) of two voters. I use this measure to determine the popularity of each voter as a candidate. I then establish local “agreeability” conditions and attempt to find a lower bound for the popularity of the best candidate. Other results about certain special societies are also obtained

In this thesis we present a framework for automatic formal analysis of competitive stochastic systems, such as sensor networks, decentralised resource management schemes or distributed user-centric environments. We model such systems as stochastic multi-player games, which are turn-based models where an action in each state is chosen by one of the players or according to a probability distribution. The specifications, such as “sensors 1 and 2 can collaborate to detect the target with probability 1, no matter what other sensors in the network do” or “the controller can ensure that the energy used is less than 75 mJ, and the algorithm terminates with probability at least 0.5'', are provided as temporal logic formulae. We introduce a branching-time temporal logic rPATL and its multi-objective extension to specify such probabilistic and reward-based properties of stochastic multi-player games. We also provide algorithms for these logics that can either verify such properties against the model, providing a yes/no answer, or perform strategy synthesis by constructing the strategy for the players that satisfies the specification. We conduct a detailed complexity analysis of the model checking problem for rPATL and its multi-objective extension and provide efficient algorithms for verification and strategy synthesis. We also implement the proposed techniques in the PRISM-games tool and apply them to the analysis of several case studies of competitive stochastic systems.

Chapters 2-3: A global games approach to sovereign debt crises The first chapters present a model that investigates the risks involved when a fiscal authority attempts to roll-over a stock of debt and there is the potential for coordination failure by investors. A continuum of investors, after receiving signals about the authority's willingness to repay, decides whether to roll-over the stock of debt. If an insufficient proportion of investors participates, the authority defaults. With one fiscal authority, private information results in a deterministic outcome. When a public signal is available, the model behaves in a similar manner to a sunspot model. In line with much of the global games literature, improving public information has an ambiguous effect on welfare. Finally, the model is extended to include a second fiscal authority, which captures a similar sunspot result and illustrates the potential for externalities in fiscal policy. Lower debt in the less indebted authority can push a more indebted authority into crisis. Lower debt makes the healthier authority relatively more attractive, which causes the investors to treat the heavily indebted authority more conservatively. In certain circumstances, this is sufficient to cause a coordination failure. Chapter 4: A debt game with correlated information This chapter models of debt roll-over where a continuum of investors receives correlated signals on whether a debtor is solvent or insolvent. The investors face a collective action problem: a sufficient proportion of investors must agree to participate in the debt roll-over for it to be a success. If an insufficient proportion of investors participates in the deal, the debtor will default. The game has a unique switching strategy, which results in global uncertainty being preserved. The ex ante distribution of play (conditional on the true solvency of the debtor) follows a Vasicek credit distribution. The ex ante probability of a debt crisis is affected by the exogenous model parameters. Of particular interest is the observation that increasing private noise unambiguously reduces the probability of a debt crisis. Unsurprisingly, increasing the fiscal space or return on debt also decreases the probability of a crisis. Chapter 5: Bailouts and politics The final chapter examines the political-economic equilibrium in a two-period model with overlapping generations and a financial sector, which is inspired by the model in Tabellini (1989). The public policy is chosen under majority rule by the agents currently alive. It demonstrates that the bailout policy adopted in the second period has important effects on the bank's financing decisions in the first period. By adopting a riskier financing regime (i.e. higher leverage) in the first period, the older generation can extract consumption from the younger generation in the second period. Sovereign backstops of the financial sector are state-contingent: they can appear costless for long periods of time but eventually result in a socialization of private-sector debt. It is this mechanism that makes implementing capital requirements costly to investors yet beneficial to the younger generation. The model also highlights two important issues: (i) bank capital is endogenous and (ii) proposed resolution mechanisms must be politically credible. It suggests that a major benefit of increasing and narrowing equity-capital requirements or increasing liquidity ratios is that they are implemented ex ante and therefore available either to absorb losses in the event of a crisis or to reduce the possibility of large drops in asset values. Finally, this chapter also provides a structure by which to interpret the stylized facts of Calomiris et al. (2014): that more populist political institutions are associated with more fragile financial systems.

As societies become increasingly connected thanks to advancing technologies and the Internet in particular, individuals and organizations (i.e. agents hereafter) engage in innumerable interaction and face constantly the possibilities thereof. Such unprecedented connectivity offers opportunities through which social and economic benefits are realised and disseminated. Nonetheless, risky and damaging interaction abound. To promote beneficial relationships and to deter adverse outcomes, agents adopt different means and resources. This thesis focuses on reputation as a crucial mechanism for promoting positive interaction, and examines the topic from game-theoretic perspective using computational methods. First, we investigate the design of reputation systems by incorporating economic incentives into algorithm design. Focusing on ubiquitous user-generated ratings on the Internet, we propose a truthful reputation mechanism that not only enforces honest reporting from individual raters but also takes into account their personal preferences. The mechanism is constructed using a blend of Bayesian Truth Serum and SimRank algorithms, both specifically adapted for our use case of online ratings. We show that the resulting mechanism is Bayesian incentive compatible and is computable in polynomial time. In addition, the mechanism is shown to be resistant to common manipulations on the Internet such as uniform fake ratings and targeted collusions. Lastly, we discuss detailed considerations for implementing the mechanism in practice. Second, we investigate experimentally the relative importance of reputational and social knowledge in sustaining cooperation in dynamic networks. In our experiments, U.S-based subjects play a repeated game where, in each round, an endogenous network is formed among a group of 13 players and each player chooses a cooperative or non-cooperative action that applies to all her connections. We vary the availability of reputational and social knowledge to subjects in 4 treatments. At the aggregate level, we find that reputational knowledge is of first-order importance for supporting cooperation, while social knowledge plays a complementary role only when reputational knowledge is available. Further community-level analysis reveals that reputational knowledge leads to the emergence of highly cooperative hubs, and a dense and cluster network, while social knowledge enhances cooperation by forming a large, dense and clustered community of cooperators who exclude outsiders through link removals and link refusals. At the individual level, reputational knowledge proves essential for the emergence of network structural characteristics that are associated with cooperative actions. In contrast, in treatments without reputational information, none of the network metrics is predicative of subjects' choices of action. Furthermore, we present UbiquityLab, a pioneering online platform for conducting real-time interactive experiments for game-theoretic studies. UbiquityLab supports both synchronous and asynchronous game models, and allows for complex and customisable interaction between subjects. It offers both back-end and front-end infrastructure with a modularised design to enable rapid development and streamlined operation. For in- stance, in synchronous mode, all per-stage and inter-stage logic are fully encapsulated by a thin server-side module, while a suite of client-side components eases the creation of game interface. The platform features a robust messaging protocol, such that player connection and game states are restored automatically upon networking errors and dropped out subjects are seamlessly substituted by customisable program players. Online experiments enjoy clear advantages over lab equivalents as they benefit from low operation cost, efficient execution, large and diverse subject pools, etc. UbiquityLab aims to promote online experiments as an emerging research methodology in experimental economics by bringing its benefits to other researchers.