Abstract. Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects in the laboratory violate game-theoretic predictions. It is here argued that this claim is usually premature. The paper elaborates on this theme by way of raising some conceptual and methodological issues in connection with the very definition of a game and of players ’ preferences, in particular with respect to potential context dependence, interpersonal preference dependence, backward induction and incomplete information.

comments from several referees and seminar participants at many universities including Harvard, Cornell, New

This paper surveys the evolutionary game theoretic literature on reciprocity in human interactions, dealing both with long-term relationships and with sporadic interactions. Four basic themes, repetition, commitment, assortation, and parochialism, appear repeatedly throughout the literature. Repetition can give rise to the evolution of behavior that exhibits reciprocity-like features but a vast array of other behaviors are also stable. In sporadic interactions, reciprocity can be stable if the propensity to punish selfish actions can induce opportunists to cooperate, if reciprocators themselves behave opportunistically when they expect others to do so, or if matching is sufficiently assortative.

Stakeholder negotiation is an increasingly important policymaking tool. However, relatively little is understood about the relationship between the structure of the negotiating process and the effectiveness with which participating stakeholders can pursue their individual interests. In this paper, we apply the Rausser-Simon multilateral bargaining model to a specific negotiation process, involving water storage capacity and use in the upper part of the Adour Basin in south-western France. In the Rausser-Simon model, the elements of negotiation structure include: the list of participants at the bargaining table; the set of issues being negotiated; the decision rule; political weights (“access”); and the nature of the outcome if agreement cannot be reached. The richness of the data and institutional information available to us provides a realistic environment in which to examine the effect of negotiation structure on participant power. We focus in particular on

Price-setting power versus private information: An experimental evaluation of their impact on holdup. ∗

This paper studies the learning process carried out by two agents who are involved in many games. As distinguishing all games can be too costly (require too much reasoning resources) agents might partition the set of all games into analogy classes. Partitions of higher cardinality are more costly. A process of simultaneous learning of actions and partitions is presented and equilibrium partitions and action choices characterized. Learning across games can destabilize strict Nash equilibria and stabilize equilibria in weakly dominated strategies as well as mixed equilibria in 2 2 Coordination games even for arbitrarily small reasoning costs. The model is also able to explain experimental …ndings from e.g. the Traveler’s dilemma or deviations from subgame perfection in Bargaining Games.