nep-gth New Economics Papers
on Game Theory
Issue of 2005‒07‒25
three papers chosen by
László Á. Kóczy
Universiteit Maastricht

  1. Assignment situations with multiple ownership and their games By Miquel,Silvia; Velzen,Bas van; Hamers,Herbert; Norde,Henk
  2. The role of networks in collective action with costly communication. By Christian R. Jaramillo H.
  3. Can Mediation Improve Upon Cheap-Talk? A Note By Ganguly, Chirantan; Ray, Indrajit

  1. By: Miquel,Silvia; Velzen,Bas van; Hamers,Herbert; Norde,Henk (Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research)
    Abstract: An assignment situation can be considered as a two-sided market consisting of two disjoint sets of objects. A non-negative reward matrix describes the profit if an object of one group is assigned to an object of the other group. Assuming that each object is owned by a different agent, Shapley and Shubik (1972) introduced a class of assignment games arising from these assignment situations. This paper introduces assignment situations with multiple ownership. In these situations each object can be owned by several agents and each agent can participate in the ownership of more than one object. In this paper we study simple assignment games and relaxations that arise from assignment situations with multiple ownership. First, necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for balanced assignment situations with multiple ownership. An assignment situation with multiple ownership is balanced if for any choice of the reward matrix the corresponding simple assignment game is balanced. Second, balancedness results are obtained for relaxations of simple assignment games.
    JEL: C71
    Date: 2005
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:kubcen:200578&r=gth
  2. By: Christian R. Jaramillo H.
    Abstract: Individuals frequently contribute their resources voluntarily to provide public goods. This paper models the manner in which the linkage between members in a community influences the likelihood of such actions through spontaneous activism in networks. The model I use abstracts from the issue of free-riding behavior by means of small deviations from standard preferences. Instead, it concentrates on the communication aspect of provision through collective action. The solution concept is Nash equilibrium. I find that the likelihood of efficient provision of a discrete public good in random social networks increases very rapidly for parameter values where the network experiences a phase transition and large-scale decentralized activism becomes feasible. As a result, the model shows that successful coordination may be more readily achieved the larger the population is, provided its members are sufficiently connected. In contrast with previous results in the literature, this results holds even as the size of the population increases without bound, and it is consistent with the existence of largescale activism in large populations.
    Keywords: Collective Action
    JEL: D70
    Date: 2005–06–25
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000138:001121&r=gth
  3. By: Ganguly, Chirantan; Ray, Indrajit
    Abstract: In the Crawford-Sobel (uniform, quadratic utility) cheap-talk model we allow for mediation in which the informed agent reports one possible element of a partition to a mediator (a communication device) and then the mediator suggests an action to the uninformed decision-maker according to the probability distribution of the device. We compare the unmediated N-partition equilibrium of the Crawford-Sobel model with a mediated equilibrium involving exactly N elements to report and N actions to choose from. We show that such a mediated equilibrium cannot improve upon the unmediated N-partition equilibrium when the preference divergence parameter is small.
    Keywords: Cheap Talk, Mediated Equilibrium
    JEL: C72
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bir:birmec:05-08&r=gth

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