No Arabic abstract
Evidence games study situations where a sender persuades a receiver by selectively disclosing hard evidence about an unknown state of the world. Evidence games often have multiple equilibria. Hart et al. (2017) propose to focus on truth-leaning equilibria, i.e., perfect Bayesian equilibria where the sender prefers disclosing truthfully when indifferent, and the receiver takes off-path disclosure at face value. They show that a truth-leaning equilibrium is an equilibrium of a perturbed game where the sender has an infinitesimal reward for truth-telling. We show that, when the receivers action space is finite, truth-leaning equilibrium may fail to exist, and it is not equivalent to equilibrium of the perturbed game. To restore existence, we introduce a disturbed game with a small uncertainty about the receivers payoff. A purifiable equilibrium is a truth-leaning equilibrium in an infinitesimally disturbed game. It exists and features a simple characterization. A truth-leaning equilibrium that is also purifiable is an equilibrium of the perturbed game.
We examine a patient players behavior when he can build reputations in front of a sequence of myopic opponents. With positive probability, the patient player is a commitment type who plays his Stackelberg action in every period. We characterize the patient players action frequencies in equilibrium. Our results clarify the extent to which reputations can refine the patient players behavior and provide new insights to entry deterrence, business transactions, and capital taxation. Our proof makes a methodological contribution by establishing a new concentration inequality.
This paper proposes a new equilibrium concept robust perfect equilibrium for non-cooperative games with a continuum of players, incorporating three types of perturbations. Such an equilibrium is shown to exist (in symmetric mixed strategies and in pure strategies) and satisfy the important properties of admissibility, aggregate robustness, and ex post robust perfection. These properties strengthen relevant equilibrium results in an extensive literature on strategic interactions among a large number of agents. Illustrative applications to congestion games and potential games are presented. In the particular case of a congestion game with strictly increasing cost functions, we show that there is a unique symmetric robust perfect equilibrium.
We study a disclosure game with a large evidence space. There is an unknown binary state. A sender observes a sequence of binary signals about the state and discloses a left truncation of the sequence to a receiver in order to convince him that the state is good. We focus on truth-leaning equilibria (cf. Hart et al. (2017)), where the sender discloses truthfully when doing so is optimal, and the receiver takes off-path disclosure at face value. In equilibrium, seemingly sub-optimal truncations are disclosed, and the disclosure contains the longest truncation that yields the maximal difference between the number of good and bad signals. We also study a general framework of disclosure games which is compatible with large evidence spaces, a wide range of disclosure technologies, and finitely many states. We characterize the unique equilibrium value function of the sender and propose a method to construct equilibria for a broad class of games.
We consider a discrete-time nonatomic routing game with variable demand and uncertain costs. Given a routing network with single origin and destination, the cost function of each edge depends on some uncertain persistent state parameter. At every period, a random traffc demand is routed through the network according to a Bayes-Wardrop equilibrium. The realized costs are publicly observed and the Bayesian belief about the state parameter is updated. We say that there is strong learning when beliefs converge to the truth and weak learning when the equilibrium flow converges to the complete-information flow. We characterize the networks for which learning occurs. We prove that these networks have a series-parallel structure and provide a counterexample to prove that the condition is necessary.
We show that, with indivisible goods, the existence of competitive equilibrium fundamentally depends on agents substitution effects, not their income effects. Our Equilibrium Existence Duality allows us to transport results on the existence of competitive equilibrium from settings with transferable utility to settings with income effects. One consequence is that net substitutability---which is a strictly weaker condition than gross substitutability---is sufficient for the existence of competitive equilibrium. We also extend the ``demand types classification of valuations to settings with income effects and give necessary and sufficient conditions for a pattern of substitution effects to guarantee the existence of competitive equilibrium.