Steven A. Matthews

Veto Threats: Rhetoric in a Bargaining Game

A specific bargaining game is studied, motivated by the speech-making, billproposing, and bill-vetoing observed in legislative processes. The game has two players, a chooser and a proposer, with the preferences of the chooser not known to the proposer. The chooser starts the game by talking. Then the proposer proposes an outcome, which the chooser accepts or vetoes. Only two kinds of perfect equilibria exist. In the more interesting kind the chooser tells the proposer which of two sets contains his type. Two proposals are possibly elicited, a compromise proposal and the proposers favorite proposal. Ironically, only the compromise proposal is ever vetoed.

Quality Testing and Disclosure

Sellers are often more able than consumers to test product quality. We show that whether such firms will voluntarily test quality and disclose what they learn depends in a paradoxical way upon the presence of mandatory disclosure rules: only if disclosure is mandatory will a seller not test and disclose. We than ask whether it is even desirable for consumers to be informed about the quality at the time they purchase. We show that if information about product quality can be obtained only after production decisions have been made, and if income effects are negligible, then consumers and firms will agree that a regime in which consumers are uninformed (informed) is preferable to a regime in which they are informed (uninformed) if income and quality are complements (substitutes) in utility. Consumers and firms can disagree -- in either way -- about which regime is better if income effects are not negligible. We conclude by discussing the desirability of mandatory testing laws.

Efficient and nearly efficient partnerships

This paper shows in two ways that the degree to which free-riding diminishes the performance of deterministic partnerships may be less than has been generally thought. First, a necessary and sufficient condition is provided for a partnership to sustain full efficiency. It implies that many non-trivial partnerships sustain efficiency, such as generic ones with finite action spaces, and neoclassical ones with Leontief technologies. Second, approximate efficiency is shown to be achievable in a large class of partnerships, including ones with smooth and monotonic production and disutility functions. Approximate efficiency is achieved by mixed-strategy equilibria: one partner takes, with small probability, an inefficient action. The degree to which efficiency is approximated is restricted only by the amount of liability the partners can bear. Nonetheless, their equilibrium payments are not arbitrarily large.

Pre-play Communication in Two- Person Sealed-Bid Double Auctions*

Allowing unmediated communication in a two-person double auction dramatically enlarges the set of equilibrium outcomes. It then consists of all allocation rules that are equilibrium outcomes of games in which all traders have the power at the end to veto proposed trades. All the allocation rules so characterized are equilibrium outcomes of a single game in which the traders exchange messages once before bidding in a double auction. These outcomes are all obtained by equilibria in which the traders truthfully tell each other their values. Adding a mediator achieves no further outcomes.

Refining Cheap-Talk Equilibria

Several conceptual points are made concerning communication in games of asymmetric information. Equilibrium refinements of Sender-Receiver cheap-talk games that are based on he concept of a putative equilibrium, and which rely on the presence of a rich language with literal meanings, are discussed. Three nested criteria are proposed: strong announcement-proofness, announcement-proofness, and weak announcement-proofness.

Constrained Plott Equilibria, Directional Equilibria and Global Cycling Sets

Recent studies use two distinct approaches to study majority rule intransitivities. First, McKelvey (1976, 1979) and Cohen (1979) examine global cycling sets in multidimensional spaces. Second, Schofield (1977, 1978a, b) investigates local continuous cycling. Both approaches lead to the conclusion that cycling sets tend to be large. In this paper, these studies are related to each other and to the work of Matthews (1978, 1979) on undominated directions. Simple observations lead to a new and stronger result indicating the extreme pervasiveness of global cycling. The key observation is that global cycling is ubiquitous for the same reason that majority rule equilibria rarely exist, namely, that the distribution of voters is rarely symmetric enough.

Managerial incentives in an entrepreneurial stock market model

Abstract This paper addresses the First Theorem of Welfare Economics in a moral hazard environment. An entrepreneur sells equity in a firm which he supplies with an unobservable, costly input. How much equity he retains determines his incentives and is observed by investors. The investors have rational expectaions which cause the equity price to increase in the amount of equity the entrepreneur retains. This gives the entrepreneur an incentive to retain equity and hence supply input. The entrepreneur may also be bound by an explicit incentive contract. In this framework, not all competitive equilibria are efficient, as defined relative to the moral hazard constraint. However, equilibria can be inefficient only if the entrepreneurs optimal input is nonunique or exhibits positive income effects.

On Modeling Cheap Talk in Bayesian Games

The “cheap talk games” studied in this chapter are games in which players with private information exchange payoff-irrelevant messages. (Crawford and Sobel (1982)) and (Green and Stokey (1980)) introduced the simplest cheap talk games, those in which a “sender” with private information sends a message to a “receiver,” who then takes an action. Equilibrium refinement criteria for sender-receiver games have been studied extensively,1 and variations of sender-receiver games have been used to model a variety of phenomena.2 Little work, however, has been done on more general cheap talk games. A few studies have considered multiple informed parties, but with only one round of pre-play communication.3 Even fewer studies have considered games with multiple rounds of communication, and then with only one informed party.4