on the robustness of equilibrium refinements abstract the philosophy of equilibrium refinements is that the analyst if he knows things about the structure of the game can reject some nash equilibria as unreasonable the word know in the preceding sentence deserves special emphasis if in a fixed game the analyst can reject a particular equilibrium outcome but he cannot do so for games arbitrarily close by then he may have second thoughts about rejecting the outcome we consider several notions of distance between games and we characterize their implications for the robustness of equilibrium refinements

seller reputation from word of mouth to centralized feedback abstract reputation is one of the most important incentives for trade and cooperation using the complete selling history of 125 135 sellers on eachnet com an ebay equivalent in china we show that sellers with a longer successful selling record enjoyed more repeat business reached more buyer regions sold in more product categories and had a higher completion rate even before eachnet introduced a centralized feedback system since the centralized feedback system the difference between reputable and non reputable sellers has decreased in terms of repeat business but enlarged in terms of market expansion these findings suggest that while reputation can facilitate trade through buyer experience and word of mouth it is not as effective as centralized feedback our study also shows that although completion rate and transaction price are the two outcomes most often examined in the literature seller reputation is important for buyer clientele market reach business scope and market survival

reputation with equal discounting in repeated games with strictly conflicting interests we analyze reputation effects in two player repeated games of strictly conflicting interests in such games player 1 has a commitment action such that a best reply to it gives player 1 the highest individually rational payoff and player 2 the minmax payoff players have equal discount factors with positive probability player 1 is a type who chooses the commitment action after every history we show that player 1 s payoff converges to the maximally feasible payoff when the discount factor converges to one this contrasts with failures of reputation effects for equal discount factors that have been demonstrated in the literature journal of economic literature classification number c71

reputation and impermanent types i consider a version of the chain store game where the incumbent firm s type evolves according to a markov process with two states a tough type who always fights entry and a weak type who prefers to accommodate there exists a minimal level of persistence necessary for the incumbent to be able to sustain any reputation for being tough above that level as the number of markets t increases in equilibrium play alternates between intervals of entry by competitors and intervals of deterrence when t is infinite then regardless of the discount factor there exists a sequential equilibrium in which the incumbent s payoff is bounded below her stackelberg payoff both results are in contrast to the outcome when the incumbent s type is fixed one interpretation is that reputation is not permanent but must be renewed occasionally

the entrepreneur s idea and outside finance theory and evidence about entrepreneurial roles abstract we study the problem faced by the entrepreneur seeking outside support to turn an entrepreneurial idea into a successful innovation specifically a successful technological innovation resulting from research and development the paper develops and tests the hypothesis that as an entrepreneur s innovative idea becomes more complex the entrepreneur will find it more difficult to obtain outside finance and then outside support more generally for the commercialization of the idea consequently the entrepreneur will be more likely to take on additional roles beyond providing the essential idea the evidence supports the hypothesis that other things being the same an entrepreneur with a more complex idea will have greater difficulty obtaining outside finance and will be more likely to take on the additional roles of development production marketing and distribution that are necessary for successful innovation

gender differences in the allocation of assets in retirement savings plans in 1995 40 percent of working men and 32 percent of working women were covered by a defined contribution dc plan a distinguishing characteristic of these plans is that workers can generally choose how their assets are invested using data from the 1992 and 1995 surveys of consumer finances scf this paper examines whether workers differ systematically by gender in the allocation of assets in dc plans previous researchers have reported that many workers tend to invest their retirement assets too conservatively and in particular that women are less likely than men to invest in risky assets such as stocks in the presence of an equity premium a lower propensity by women to invest in stocks could translate into large differences in the accumulation of financial wealth for retirement we establish that gender differences in investment decisions exist though they are more complicated than previous studies have suggested we show that these differences are not completely explained by differences in individual or household characteristics a few studies have examined gender differences in investment decisions vickie l bajtelsmit and jack l vanderhei 1997 richard p hinz et al 1997 these studies use administrative data and report that women tend to invest their retirement funds in less risky vehicles than men michael haliassos and carol c bertaut 1995 use the 1983 scf to examine why such a large fraction of households do not own any stock they report that gender does not have a significant effect on the probability of owning stock though gender differences are not the focus of their paper what these data sources lack haliassos and bertaut being the exception is a rich set of demographic and other variables on households that theory predicts should affect investment behavior this paper adds to the literature by examining gender differences in investment decisions conditioning on such variables the results highlight the importance of including marital status risk aversion measures and the portfolio of assets held outside dc plans when examining gender differences in investment decisions in these plans

reputation and experimentation in repeated games with two long run players this paper considers reputation effects in a repeated game between two long run players one of whom is relatively patient and may be committed to a fixed strategy which punishes the opponent for increasingly long periods whenever inappropriate actions are taken by following this commitment strategy the more patient player can induce a sufficiently patient opponent to experiment to see whether the commitment strategy is also being followed off the equilibrium path this can guarantee the more patient player in any nash equilibrium a payoff close to the highest feasible payoff consistent with the individual rationality of the other player for an arbitrary degree of patience of the less patient player a weaker result is established the more patient player is guaranteed an average equilibrium payoff close to the static stackelberg payoff this latter result generalizes that of schmidt 1993 who established the same result for the restricted class of games of conflicting interests

measuring the duration of unemployment spells an understanding of the duration of unemployment spells is important for at least two reasons first the length of time spent unemployed has a direct bearing on individual welfare few people would feel so threatened by unemployment if they were certain it would only last a few weeks second changes in the duration of unemployment spells are an important influence on the aggregate unemployment rate the persistence of high unemployment after a recession and well into recovery and expansion is a puzzle to many one that requires an appreciation of changes in the incidence and duration of unemployment if it is to be solved the research summarized in this paper derives a measure of the complete length of unemployment spells in canada and analyzes how it changes over the business cycle the cyclical movement of the average complete duration of unemployment contrasts sharply with that of the average incomplete duration which is regularly published by statistics canada the first section of the paper discusses these differences by highlighting aggregate developments during the last two recessions while the second section outlines the methodology used and some of the results of comparing the experience during the recession of the early 1990s with that during the early 1980s

the breakdown of hierarchies in the soviet union and china a neoinstitutional perspective why did modest attempts to decentralize the centrally administered soviet system lead to its collapse while more far reaching decentralization in china left central political and administrative hierarchies intact this article analyzes the disintegration of centrally planned organizations in the context of a neoinstitutional model of the breakdown of authority within hierarchies an agency model of hierarchy is presented that incorporates the ambiguous property rights authority relations and risk sharing conditions that prevailed under central planning and then persist during postcommunist transitions this model suggests that decentralizing reforms could trigger an organizational bank run prompting local agents to seize organizational assets under their control the article also considers reputation preserving strategies that central authorities might use to avert disintegration as an application of this model the collapse of soviet political industrial and state fiscal hierarchies are considered and compared with the experience of analogous sectors in china reforms in both states transferred significant autonomy from the center to local field agents in the soviet case these agents appropriated organizational assets with little interference from the center in china by contrast the center preserved both its capacity for monitoring and its reputation for disciplining transgressions and the rise of hybrid ownership forms made expropriation of state and party assets far less attractive

when does cheating on mail in bids pay a guide for the dishonest auctioneer abstract in english auctions an auctioneer sometimes receives second price bids from bidders who cannot attend the auction these bids are referred to as mail in bids left bids or bookbids and are commonly handled by an auctioneer s assistant in this paper i consider auctions where there is one bid left with the auctioneer in an english auction with no reserve the auctioneer can increase his revenue by cheating at least partially through phantom bids or large bidding increments on the bookbid when the bookbidder s valuation is more likely to be the highest than the second highest among all valuations this is true even if in equilibrium this cheating is perfectly anticipated this implies that the acquisition of a good reputation is not a sufficient incentive for honest auctioneer behavior

are women more risk averse we find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men using u s sample data we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking as wealth increases the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age race and number of children greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women s lower levels of wealth compared with men s jel j16 d81 g11

reputation and exogenous private learning abstract short run competitors in the chain store game receive noisy signals of the long run incumbent firm s type the history of signals which in the limit is fully revealing is observable to the competitors but possibly not to the incumbent as long as there is sufficient noise in the signals then in any equilibrium a patient weak incumbent obtains a payoff strictly higher than her minmax payoff

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

a theory of ambiguity credibility and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information this paper develops a positive theory of credibility ambiguity and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information the monetary policymaker maximizes his own politically motivated objective function that is positively related to economic stimulation through monetary surprises and negatively related to monetary growth the relative importance he assigns to each target shifts stochastically through time his current preference trade off is known to him but not to the public when choosing the state contingent path of money growth for the present and the future the policymaker compares the benefits from current stimulation with the costs associated with higher future inflation expectations current monetary growth conveys information to the public about future money growth because there is persistence in the policymaker s objectives although expectations are rational information is imperfect because monetary control procedures are imprecise as a result the public cannot correctly distinguish persistent changes of emphasis on different policy objectives from transitory monetary control errors the public becomes aware of changes gradually by observing past monetary growth credibility is defined in terms of the speed with which the public recognizes changes in the objectives of the policymaker credibility is lower the noisier monetary control and the more stable the objectives of the policymaker looser monetary control and a higher degree of time preference on the part of the policymaker induce him to produce higher and more variable monetary growth when the policymaker is free to determine the accuracy of monetary control he does not always choose the most effective control available in spite of the fact that monetary surprises always have an expected value of zero the reason is that ambiguous control procedures enable the policymaker to generate positive surprises when he cares more than on average about economic stimulation he leaves the inevitable negative surprises for periods in which he cares more about inflation prevention this result provides an explanation for the fed s preference for ambiguity recently documented by goodfriend 1986 the policymaker is more likely to pick more ambiguous control procedures the more uncertain his objectives and the higher his time preference the paper also provides a theoretical underpinning for the well documented crosscountry positive correlation between the level and the variability of inflation

affirmative action programs and business ownership among minorities and women affirmative action programs are commonly used as a means to level the playing field for minority and women owned firms in public procurement markets and therefore may be a positive factor in business entry and survival to the extent that affirmative action programs also apply to traditional labor markets however they may alter the opportunity cost of starting a business we utilize the elimination of affirmative action in california and washington states through voter initiatives to identify the effect of affirmative action on minority and female self employment rates in our base specifications we find evidence of modest increases in self employment among minorities and women in both california and washington after elimination of affirmative action consistent with the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of starting a business fell due to restricting opportunities in the traditional labor markets the sign of the estimated effect however is not uniformly positive when considering specific race gender groups and the statistical significance of the main results is somewhat sensitive to the choice of control states

university spin out companies and venture capital abstract the creation of university spin out companies that create wealth is a major policy objective of governments and universities finance is a catalyst of this wealth creation yet access to venture capital is a major impediment faced by these companies in this article we adopt a finance pecking order perspective to examine the problems faced by those university spin out companies seeking to access venture capital we triangulate evidence from spin out companies university technology transfer offices and venture capital firms in the uk and continental europe to identify the problems and to suggest policy developments for these parties as well as government we compare perceptions of high tech venture capital firms that invest in spin outs with those that do not and also consider vcs views on spin outs versus other high tech firms our evidence identifies a mismatch between the demand and supply side of the market in line with the pecking order theory venture capitalists prefer to invest after the seed stage however in contrast to the pecking order theory ttos see venture capital as more important than internal funds early on we develop policy implications for universities technology transfer offices academic entrepreneurs venture capital firms and government and suggest areas for further research

private investor participation and commercialization rates for government sponsored research and development would a prediction market improve the performance of the sbir programme an objective of the us small business innovation research sbir programme is the private sector commercialization of funded rd our analysis of department of defense dod phase ii awards suggests that the estimated probability of commercialization is only 0 47 we investigate econometrically whether outside private investors have useful information about proposed sbir projects prospects for commercialization our findings suggest that they do thereby providing support for the possibility that a prediction market could improve the performance of the sbir programme

heterogeneity in risky choice behaviour in a broad population we analyse risk preferences using an experiment with real incentives in a representative sample of 1 422 dutch respondents our econometric model incorporates four structural parameters that vary with observed and unobserved characteristics utility curvature loss aversion preferences towards the timing of uncertainty resolution and the propensity to choose randomly rather than on the basis of preferences we find that all four parameters contribute to explaining choice behaviour the structural parameters are significantly associated with socio economic variables but it is essential to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity in each of them to match the rich variety of choice patterns in the data

microcredit an answer to the gender problem in funding microfinance institutions mfis target people excluded from the traditional banking system by providing start up capital to these under financed individuals they enable a greater number of women to start their own business particularly in sectors where initial capital requirements are high our study follows a portfolio of 3 640 microcredit applicants in france over the 2000 2006 time period identifying mfi client profiles and bringing to light gender differences in borrowers compared to a wider sample of entrepreneurs this study shows that the male female gap found amongst company creators is also maintained amongst the clienteles of mfis empirical results also suggest that gender is a decisive factor regarding the amount of credit provided to borrowers when comparing with other factors in the borrower and firm profile thus to a certain extent mfis are found to reinforce gender inequalities in france

repeated games with long run and short run players this paper studies the set of equilibrium payoffs in repeated games with long and short run players and little discounting because the short run players are unconcerned about the future each equilibrium outcome is constrained to lie on their static reaction best response curves the natural extension of the folk theorem to games of this sort would simply include this constraint in the definitions of the feasible payoffs and minmax values in fact this extension does obtain under the assumption that each player s choice of a mixed strategy for the stage game is publicly observable but in contrast to standard repeated games the set of equilibrium payoffs is different if players can observe only their opponents realized actions

crime intimidation and whistleblowing a theory of inference from unverifiable reports we consider a game between a principal an agent and a monitor in which the principal would like to rely on messages by the monitor the potential whistleblower to target intervention against a misbehaving agent the difficulty is that the agent can credibly threaten to retaliate against the monitor in the event of an intervention in this setting intervention policies that are responsive to the monitor s message provide informative signals to the agent which can be used to target threats efficiently principals that are too responsive to information shut down communication channels successful intervention policies must therefore garble the information provided by monitors and cannot be fully responsive we show that policy evaluation on the basis of non verifiable whistleblower messages is feasible under arbitrary incomplete information provided policy design takes into account that messages are endogenous

leveraging entrepreneurship through private investments does gender matter using project data from a random sample of phase ii research awards from the national institutes of health sbir program we estimate the relative probability that woman owned firms are able to attract private investments to fund the transition of the technology developed under the sponsorship of the sbir program to an innovation to enter the market we find that women owned firms are as much as 16 points less likely to attract private investment dollars compared to male owned firms factors excluding the size of the sbir award held constant women owned firms that received larger awards performed substantially better although the sbir program has a legislated directive to increase the participation of woman owned firms in the program our findings suggest that it might not be sufficient to overcome market perceptions about the profitability of such investments actually bringing a developed technology to market

gambling reputation repeated bargaining with outside options we study the role of incomplete information and outside options in determining bargaining postures and surplus division in repeated bargaining between a long run player and a sequence of short run players the outside option is not only a disagreement point but reveals information privately held by the long run player in equilibrium the uninformed short run players offers do not always respond to changes in reputation and the informed long run player s payoffs are discontinuous the long run player invokes inefficient random outside options repeatedly to build reputation to a level where the subsequent short run players succumb to his extraction of a larger payoff but he also runs the risk of losing reputation and relinquishing bargaining power we investigate equilibrium properties when the discount factor goes to 1 and when the informativeness of outside options diffuses in both cases bargaining outcomes become more inefficient and the limit reputation building probabilities are interior publication abstract

incentive contracts in two sided moral hazards with multiple agents abstract the paper studies a contracting problem in which a principal enters in two sided moral hazards withnindependent agents there are no technological or informational linkages among thenagency problems despite this independence optimal incentive schemes essentially eliminate the principal s incentive problem when team size is large enough reputation like effects appear in a static setting through an improved aggregation of information about the actions of the principal one implication of this result is that it is generally suboptimal to require an agent s compensation to depend only on his own outcome another implication is the existence of purely informational economies of scale to increasing team size thus the concentration of otherwise unrelated transactions in a single firm creates wealth through a more efficient use of information about the principal s actions the paper also shows that extremely simple statistical contracts are approximately optimal in large teams the outcome of such contracts is observationally indistinguishable from standard principal agent contracts this provides a theoretical justification for using standard principal agent contracts in environments that involve two sided hazard in a fundamental way journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d21 d23

reputation and the flow of information in repeated games this paper derives payoff bounds from reputation effects akin to those of fudenberg and levine 1992 for repeated moral hazard games in which a long run player interacts frequently with a population of short run players and the monitoring technology varies with the length of the period of interaction the bounds depend on the monitoring technology through the flow of information a measure of signal informativeness per unit of time based on the relative entropy examples are shown where under complete informatione the set of equilibrium payoffs of the long run player converges as the period length tends to zero to the set of static equilibrium payoffs whereas when the game is perturbed by a small ex ante probability on commitment types reputation effects remain powerful in the frequent interaction limit

sustainable reputations with rating systems abstract in a product choice game played between a long lived seller and an infinite sequence of buyers we assume that buyers cannot observe past signals to facilitate the analysis of applications such as online auctions e g ebay online shopping search engines e g bizrate com and consumer reports we assume that a central mechanism observes all past signals and makes public announcements every period the set of announcements and the mapping from observed signals to the set of announcements is called a rating system we show that absent reputation effects information censoring cannot improve attainable payoffs however if there is an initial probability that the seller is a commitment type that plays a particular strategy every period then there exists a finite rating system and an equilibrium of the resulting game such that the expected present discounted payoff of the seller is almost his stackelberg payoff after every history this is in contrast to cripps mailath and samuelson 2004 5 where it is shown that reputation effects do not last forever in such games if buyers can observe all past signals we also construct finite rating systems that increase payoffs of almost all buyers while decreasing the seller s payoff

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

is more information always better a case in credit markets this paper studies the impact of behavioral and non behavioral information contained in consumer credit reports on the credit market a repeated game of incomplete information between a borrower and a sequence of lenders is considered lenders beliefs regarding the borrower s type depend on the borrower s historical loan performance and other informative signals it is established that for low beliefs strategic defaults occur in equilibrium as the borrower defaults on his loans despite having the ability to repay them further as the ancillary signals become increasingly informative of the borrower s type the range of beliefs over which strategic defaults occur expands this increase in strategic defaults highlights an unintended negative effect of allowing informative signals to influence beliefs on the upside the informative signals allow lenders to learn the borrower s type more quickly

the gender gap in federal and private support for entrepreneurship the role of gender in entrepreneurship has been thoroughly investigated however less is known about gender differences in access to private investment when attempting to develop a new technology in this paper we use data collected by the national research council of the national academies to estimate differences between the probability that a female owned firm and a male owned firm both conducting research funded by the small business innovation research program will receive private investment funding to help to commercialize the funded technology we find that female owned firms are disadvantaged in their access to private investment especially in the west and northeast regions of the usa

predation and its rate of return the sugar industry 1887 1914 we show that the price wars following two major entry episodes were predatory our proof is twofold by direct comparison of price to marginal cost and by construction of a lower bound to predicted competitive price cost margins that we show to exceed observed margins predation occurred only when its relative cost to the dominant firm the american sugar refining company asrc was small its most clear effect was to lower the acquisition price of entrants and small incumbents it may also have deterred future capacity additions and raised asrc s share of industry profits predation operated by strengthening asrc s reputation as a willing predator

merging reputation and repeated games with incomplete information we relate and unify several results that appeared in the following domains merging of probabilities perturbed games and reputation phenomena and repeated games with incomplete information journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d83

information acquisition and reputation dynamics we study dynamic incentives and behaviour in markets with costly discovery of past transactions in our model a sequence of short lived customers interact over time with a single long lived firm that privately knows its type good or opportunistic customers must pay to observe the firm s past behaviour we characterize the equilibrium structure that features accumulation consumption and restoration of reputation the opportunistic firm deliberately builds its reputation up to a point where the maximum periods of information acquired by customers do not reveal past opportunistic behaviour and exploits the customers who most trust the firm copyright 2011 oxford university press

is more information always better experimental financial markets with cumulative information abstract we study the value of information in financial markets by asking whether having more information always leads to higher returns we address this question in an experiment where information about an asset s intrinsic value is cumulatively distributed among traders we find that only the very best informed traders i e insiders significantly outperform less informed traders however there is a wide range of information levels from zero information to above average information levels where additional information does not yield higher returns the latter result implies that the value of additional information need not be strictly positive

financial decision making are women really more risk averse 40 males 33 females gain gambling gain domain loss gambling loss domain a contextual frames b abstract gambling frames studies the application of experimental methods provided stronger control of the economic environment in which decisions were made we elicited data which call into question the prevalence of stereotypic risk attitudes in financial decision making first we find that the comparative risk propensity of male and female subjects is strongly dependent on the financial decision setting second and more important we observe no gender differences in risk propensity when subjects face contextual decisions since in practice financial decisions are always contextual our results suggest that the above gender stereotype may not reflect true male and female attitudes toward financial risks i gender specific risk behavior an experimental design our experiment was designed to examine gender specific risk propensity in decisions relevant for investors and managers table 1 gives an overview of the experimental design in the main treatment we implemented risky choices in the form of investment and insurance decisions choice behavior in this treatment henceforth called the context treatment directly measures the risk behavior of male and female subjects in contextual financial decisions we also ran a control treatment in which the same risky choices were presented as abstract gambling decisions this control treatment henceforth called the abstract treatment allows us to validate the risk behavior induced by our experimental procedure in the light of the above mentioned gambling evidence in the context treatment subjects were confronted with risky choices in two different decision contexts subjects first had to complete a series of investment decisions they were then presented with a series of identical choices this time however framed as insur1 wealth effects from income differences outside the laboratory may still affect risk behavior in our experiment they are controlled for in our model 2 experimental instructions are available in german from the authors or in english from our web page www wif ethz ch publikationen htm ance decisions each investment and insurance decision incorporated a choice between a risky lottery and a certain payoff with the series of choices implemented in the two frames we elicited our subjects certainty equivalents for the same four risky lotteries l1 l2 l3 l4 in both contexts we implemented two frames in the context treatment in order to measure the risk propensity of subjects toward both perceived gains and perceived losses in both frames all possible payoffs for each decision were positive in the investment frame these payoffs were also presented as gains while in the insurance frame the same payoffs were presented as losses relative to an initial endowment therefore elicited certainty equivalents in the investment frame measure subjects risk propensities in the gain domain while certainty equivalents in the insurance frame measure risk propensity in the loss domain if in contextual financial decisions female subjects are generally more risk averse than men our results should display ceteris paribus lower female certainty equivalents in both the investment and insurance frames 3 the four lotteries l1 l2 l3 and l4 each had two possible outcomes payoffs in swiss francs 1 sfr a 0 60 and their probabilities were 30 sfr 6 10 sfr 6 30 sfr 2 10 sfr 2 30 sfr 6 10 sfr 6 and 50 sfr 2 20 sfr 2 respectively 4 experimental evidence suggests that individual risk propensity will vary systematically between the gain and loss domain daniel kahneman and amos tversky 1979 383 vol 89 no 2 gender and economic transactions 3y16 my68 mp 383 friday dec 10 08 20 am lp aer my68 figure 1 differences in mean certainty equivalents ce between male and female subjects by frame note certainty equivalents and male female differences are measured in swiss francs in the abstract treatment we confronted a different group of subjects with exactly the same risky decisions as those in the main treatment however as mentioned before all choices in this control treatment were framed as abstract gambling decisions again two frames were implemented in the gaingambling and loss gambling frames we measured the risk attitudes of subjects toward gambles in the gain and loss domain respectively subjects in both treatments were told in advance that one of their choices would determine their experimental earnings further all subjects completed a post experimental questionnaire which yielded information on each subject s disposable income this information is necessary to exclude wealth effects due to income differences outside the laboratory as an explanation of gender specific choice behavior

learning and information aggregation in an exit game we analyze information aggregation in a stopping game with uncertain common payos players learn from their own private experiences as well as by observing the actions of other players we give a full characterization of the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium and show that information aggregates in randomly occurring exit waves observational learning induces the players to stay in the game longer the equilibria display aggregate randomness even for large numbers of players

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

maintaining a reputation when strategies are imperfectly observed this paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long run player whose choice of stage game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents we obtain lower and upper bounds on the long run player s payoff in any nash equilibrium of the game if the long run player s stage game strategy is statistically identified by the observed outcomes then for generic payoffs the upper and lower bounds both converge as the discount factor tends to 1 to the long run player s stackelberg payoff which is the most he could obtain by publicly committing himself to any strategy

the value of commitment with imperfect observability and private information the idea that commitment is valuable plays a key role in many economic models however bagwell 1995 has shown that commitment may have no value if there is even a slight noise in the observation of the leader s action thus casting doubt on the notion that commitment has strategic value here i reconsider the commitment story in a model where the leader s action is imperfectly observed and the leader has private information and i examine how it is affected by uncertainty about the leader s type and by the observation noise