Income From Separate Property: Towards a Theoretical Foundation

The characterization of the rents, issues and profits from separate property brought into or acquired during marriage is discussed. There has been no comprehensive treatment of this issue in community property case law and literature in recent years

Engodeneity of Alternating Offers in a Bargaining Game

We investigate an infinite horizon two-person simultaneous offer bargaining game of incomplete information with discounted playoffs. In each period, each player chooses to give in or hold out. The game continues until at least one of the players chooses to give in, at which point agreement has been reached and the game terminates, with an agreement benefit accruing to each player, and a cost to the player (or players) that give in. Players have privately known agreement benefits. 'Low benefit players have a weakly dominant strategy to hold out forever; high benefit players would be better off giving in if they knew their opponent was planning to hold out forever. For any discount factor there is a unique Nash equilibrium in which the two players alternate in their willingness to give in, if the players' priors about each others type are sufficiently asymmetric. Second, for almost all priors, this is the unique equilibrium if the discount factor is close enough to one

An Experimental Study of the Centipede Game

We report on an experiment in which individuals play a version of the centipede game. In this game, two players alternately get a chance to take the larger portion of a continually escalating pile of money. As soon as one person takes, the game ends with that player getting the larger portion of the pile, and the other player getting the smaller portion. If one views the experiment as a complete information game, all standard game theoretic equilibrium concepts predict the first mover should take the large pile on the first round. The experimental results show that this does not occur. An alternative explanation for the data can be given if we reconsider the game as a game of incomplete information in which there is some uncertainty over the payoff functions of the players. In particular, if the subjects believe there is some small likelihood that the opponent is an altruist, then in the equilibrium of this incomplete information game, players adopt mixed strategies in the early rounds of the experiment, with the probability of taking increasing as the pile gets larger. We investigate how well a version of this model explains the data observed in the centipede experiments

Quantal Response Equilibria for Extensive Form Games

This paper investigates the use of standard econometric models for quantal choice to study equilibria of extensive form games. Players make choices based on a quantal choice model, and assume other players do so as well. We define an Agent Quantal Response Equilibrium (AQRE), which applies QRE to the agent normal form of an extensive form game and imposes a statistical version of sequential rationality. We also define a parametric specification, called logit-AQRE, in which quantal choice probabilities are given by logit response functions. AQRE makes predictions that contradict the invariance principle in systematic ways. We show that these predictions match up with some experimental findings by Schotter, Weigelt and Wilson (1993) about the play of games that differ only with respect to inessential transformations of the extensive form. The logit-AQRE also implies a unique selection from the set of subgame perfect equilibria in generic extensive form games. We examine data from signalling game experiments by Banks, Camerer, and Porter (1994) and Brandts and Holt (1993). We find that the logit-AQRE selection applied to these games succeeds in predicting patterns of behavior observed in these experiments, even when our prediction conflicts with more standard equilibrium refinements, such as the intuitive criterion. We also reexamine data from the McKelvey and Palfrey (1992) centipede experiment

The Holdout Game: An Experimental Study of an Infinitely Repeated Game with Two-Sided Incomplete Information

We investigate experimentally a two-person infinitely repeated game of incomplete information. In the stage game, each player chooses to give in or hold out. Players have privately known costs of giving in and each player receives a fixed benefit whenever at least one player gives in. High cost players have a dominant strategy in the stage game to hold out, and the low cost players ' best response depends on what the opponent does. Equilibrium play to the infinitely repeated game conveys information about the players’ type. We investigate two questions: whether there is any evidence that subject behavior approximates belief stationary equilibria, and whether there is evidence that subjects will converge to an equilibrium of the correct state. We conclude that subjects do not adopt symmetric belief stationary strategies for the holdout game. However, we cannot reject the hypotheses that subjects converge towards eventually playing an equilibrium of the correct state (even though they do not always learn the correct state). Behavior of experienced subjects is closer to the predictions of symmetric belief-stationary equilibrium

Quantum Coherence of Critical Unstable Two-Level Systems

We study in detail the dynamics of unstable two-level quantum systems by adopting the Bloch-sphere formalism of qubits. By employing the Bloch-vector representation for such unstable qubit systems, we identify a novel class of critical scenarios in which the so-called energy-level and decay-width vectors, ${\bf E}$ and ${\bf\Gamma}$, are orthogonal to one another, and the parameter $r = |{\bf \Gamma}|/(2|{\bf E}|)$ is less than 1. Most remarkably, we find that critical unstable qubit systems exhibit atypical behaviours like coherence--decoherence oscillations when analysed in an appropriately defined co-decaying frame of the system. In the same frame, a unit Bloch vector ${\bf b}$ describing a pure critical qubit will sweep out unequal areas during equal intervals of time, while rotating about the vector ${\bf E}$. These phenomena emerge beyond the usual oscillatory pattern due to the energy-level difference of the two-level quantum system. Interestingly enough, we observe that these new features will persist even for quasi-critical scenarios, in which the vectors ${\bf E}$ and ${\bf\Gamma}$ are not perfectly orthogonal to each other. Applications of our results to quantum information and to unstable meson--antimeson and other systems are discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figure