Angelo Antoci

A public contracting evolutionary game with corruption

In this paper, firms are randomly matched from a continuous population to play a public contracting game (say, building a bridge). Price is given, so firms compete in quality; the higher the quality offer, the less the profit. According to the official rules of the contest, the firm bidding the highest quality wins; however, we consider the possibility that firms attempt to corrupt the public officer in charge in order to be sure to win even if bidding a lower quality (quality bids are not publicly observable). Whether or not firms attempt to corrupt depends on how rewarding corruption is w. r. t. being honest. Within a dynamic evolutionary framewark, we investigate how “social conventions” with or without corruption are established under various assumptions concerning the corruptability of the public officer and the possibility of an external monitoring of the officers decisions by a “super partes” authority.

Evolutionary Selection of Correlation Mechanisms for Coordination Games

One of the main problems with the notion of correlated equilibrium is the lack of an explicit rationale for the correlation mechanism that is adopted. This paper investigates the conditions under which a specific correlation mechanism may be selected through a social learning process in a population of boundedly rational players that are randomly matched to play a coordination game. The selection process among correlation mechanisms is defined by replicator equations and the qualitative features of the dynamics are analyzed for the general case with n correlation devices. It is found that the dynamics generically select one specific mechanism among the alternative ones, thus bringing about a social standard of choice, i.e. a conventional way of correlating players‘ actions in anonymous interactions. This result then provides a strong evolutionary rationale for correlated equilibrium as a solution concept for coordination games.