Etude d'un jeu de negociation strategique sequentiel avec information incomplete. Caracterisation d'une classe d'equilibres sequentiels appeles equilibres sequentiels de negociation et demonstration de l'unicite de cet equilibre

Focuses on a study which examined perfect equilibrium in a bargaining model. Overview of the strategic approach adopted for the study; Details of the bargaining situation used; Discussion on perfect equilibrium. (From Ebsco)

A single seller of an indivisible good operates in a market with many consumers who differ in their ability to process information. The consumers' constraints are modeled in two submodels: the first in terms of the limits on the number of sets in the partition of the price space, and the second in terms of the limits on the complexity of the operation he can use to process a price offer. For the construction of the second submodel, the tool of a "perceptron" is borrowed from the parallel computation literature. Assuming a negative correlation between the seller's cost of supply of the good and the consumer's ability to process information, I demonstrate that the heterogeneity of consumer's abilities can be used by the seller to profitably discriminate among them.

For a market with a finite number of agents, pairwise matching and bargaining, it is shown that, even when the market is frictionless, the equilibrium is not necessarily competitive. It depends on the amount of information agents use. If their behaviour is conditioned only on the sets of agents present and the time, the competitive solution is the unique subgame perfect equilibrium. If agents have full information and condition their behaviour on some of it, there are also noncompetitive equilibria in which behaviour depends on specific information such as the identity of the trading partner and past events.

We study a model of a market with three types of agents: sellers, buyers, and middlemen. Buyers and sellers can trade directly or indirectly through the middlemen. The analysis focuses on steady state situations in which the numbers of agents of the different types and hence the trading opportunities are constant over time. The paper provides a framework for analyzing the activity of middlemen and the endogenous determination of the extent of that activity. It highlights the relations between the trading procedure and the distribution of the gains from trade.

We study a principal–agent model in which the agent is boundedly rational in his ability to understand the principal's decision rule. The principal wishes to elicit an agent's true profile so as to determine whether or not to grant him a certain request. The principal designs a questionnaire and commits himself to accepting certain responses. In designing such a questionnaire, the principal takes into account the bounded rationality of the agent and wishes to reduce the success probability of a dishonest agent who is trying to game the system. It is shown that the principal can construct a sufficiently complex questionnaire that will allow him to respond optimally to agents who tell the truth and at the same time to almost eliminate the probability that a dishonest agent will succeed in cheating.

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener's point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at most one. A mechanism specifies a set of messages that the speaker can send and a rule that determines the listener's response, namely, which aspect he checks and whether he accepts or rejects the speaker's request. We study mechanisms that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request when it is justified and rejects the request when it is unjustified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We show that a simple optimal mechanism exists and can be found by solving a linear programming problem in which the set of constraints is derived from what we call the L-principle.

The authors study the Nash equilibria of a two-person, infinitely-repeated game in which players' preferences depend on repeated game payoffs and the complexity of the strategies they use. The model considered is that of A. Rubinstein (1986). Necessary conditions on the structure of the equilibria are derived. These results place significant restrictions on equilibrium payoffs. The results suggest that the introduction of implementation costs results in a striking discontinuity in the Nash equilibrium sets in terms of strategies and payoffs. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.