Games to induce specified equilibria

AbstractMedia access protocols in wireless networks require each contending node to wait for a backoff time, chosen randomly from a fixed range, before attempting to transmit on a shared channel. However, nodes acting in their own selfish interest may not follow the protocol. In this paper, a static version of the problem is modeled as a strategic game played by non-cooperating, rational players (the nodes). The objective is to design a game which exhibits a unique, a priori mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. In the context of the media access problem, the equilibrium of the game would correspond to nodes choosing backoff times randomly from a given range of values, according to the given distribution. We consider natural variations of the problems concerning the number of actions available to the players and show that it is possible to design such a game when there are at least two players that each have the largest number of possible actions among all players. In contrast, we show that if there are exactly two players with different number of actions available to them, then it becomes impossible to design a strategic game with a unique such Nash equilibrium

Dynamic Coordination via Organizational Routines

We investigate dynamic coordination among members of a problem solving team who receive private signals about which of their actions are required for a (static) coordinated solution and who have repeated opportunities to explore different action combinations. In this environment ordinal equilibria, in which agents condition only on how their signals rank their actions and not on signal strength, lead to simple patterns of behavior that have a natural interpretation as routines. These routine spartially solve the team’s coordination problem by synchronizing the team’s search efforts and prove to be resilient to changes in the environment by being expost equilibria, to agents having only a coarse understanding of other agents’ strategies by being fully cursed, and to natural forms of agents’ overcon?dence. The price of this resilience is that optimal routines are frequently not optimal equilibria

Simple Efficient Contracts in Complex Environments

The paper studies a general model of hold-up in a setting encompassing the models of Segal (1999) and Che and Hausch (1999) among others. It is shown that if renegotiation is modelled as an infinite-horizon non-cooperative bargaining game then, with a simple initial contract, an efficient equilibrium will generally exist. The contract gives authority to one party to set the terms of trade and gives the other party a non-expiring option to trade at these terms. The difference from standard results arises because the existing contract ensures that the renegotiation game has multiple equilibria; the multiplicity of continuation equilibria can be used to enforce efficient investment