527 research outputs found
Cooperation and Competition when Bidding for Complex Projects: Centralized and Decentralized Perspectives
To successfully complete a complex project, be it a construction of an
airport or of a backbone IT system, agents (companies or individuals) must form
a team having required competences and resources. A team can be formed either
by the project issuer based on individual agents' offers (centralized
formation); or by the agents themselves (decentralized formation) bidding for a
project as a consortium---in that case many feasible teams compete for the
contract. We investigate rational strategies of the agents (what salary should
they ask? with whom should they team up?). We propose concepts to characterize
the stability of the winning teams and study their computational complexity
A Theory of coalition Bargaining
When voting takes place in democratic institutions, we find (either explicitly or implicitly) that there is an agenda setter or a formateur. Such players are uniquely able to make substantive proposals for given topics. Their statuses remain intact even after rejection of proposals, but they must revise rejected proposals constructively (e.g. towards a compromise). We model this in a general environment, show that the equilibrium outcome is generically unique, and characterize it explicitely. The equilibrium outcome is robust to (partially) binding communication between the formateur and the voters. As illustrations, we consider majority bargaining about a cake (leaned on Baron and Ferejohn,1989),where the formateur ends up being a perfect dictator, and a model of legislative voting (leaned on Jackson and Moselle,2002), where he is a dictator if his ideological position is within the quartiles of the parliament. In these cases, our model implements (reversed) McKelvey majority path. Depending on the valuations, the formateur´s power may be weakened when parliamentary decisions can be revised, as this may faciliate tacit collusion amongst the voters. --coalitional bargaining,legislature,non-cooperative
Aspiration Dynamics of Multi-player Games in Finite Populations
Studying strategy update rules in the framework of evolutionary game theory,
one can differentiate between imitation processes and aspiration-driven
dynamics. In the former case, individuals imitate the strategy of a more
successful peer. In the latter case, individuals adjust their strategies based
on a comparison of their payoffs from the evolutionary game to a value they
aspire, called the level of aspiration. Unlike imitation processes of pairwise
comparison, aspiration-driven updates do not require additional information
about the strategic environment and can thus be interpreted as being more
spontaneous. Recent work has mainly focused on understanding how aspiration
dynamics alter the evolutionary outcome in structured populations. However, the
baseline case for understanding strategy selection is the well-mixed population
case, which is still lacking sufficient understanding. We explore how
aspiration-driven strategy-update dynamics under imperfect rationality
influence the average abundance of a strategy in multi-player evolutionary
games with two strategies. We analytically derive a condition under which a
strategy is more abundant than the other in the weak selection limiting case.
This approach has a long standing history in evolutionary game and is mostly
applied for its mathematical approachability. Hence, we also explore strong
selection numerically, which shows that our weak selection condition is a
robust predictor of the average abundance of a strategy. The condition turns
out to differ from that of a wide class of imitation dynamics, as long as the
game is not dyadic. Therefore a strategy favored under imitation dynamics can
be disfavored under aspiration dynamics. This does not require any population
structure thus highlights the intrinsic difference between imitation and
aspiration dynamics
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