Stackelberg rent-seeking

In this paper I present a formal analysis of rent-seeking games in which the players do not move simultaneously. I consider rent-seeking situations where the players are risk neutral and may value the prize differently. The subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in this Stackelberg game provides several surprising and interesting results. I extend the problem to deal with cases of incomplete information concerning the value a player has for the politically contestable rent.     

Correlated payoffs in the inspection game: some theory and an application to corruption

The inspection game as formulated by Tsebelis (Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 83:77–91, 1989) has the counterintuitive implication that crime is unaffected by the magnitude of the penalty. This paper demonstrates that to attain this outcome, it is necessary to assume independence of enforcer and offender payoffs. Given correlated payoffs, the comparative statics of the equilibrium yield an inverse relationship between crime and the severity of the sanction. In an application, we enrich the framework of Tsebelis by adding corruption stages and show that this can imply such a correlation of payoffs. Another interesting finding is that harsher anticorruption measures can increase crime incentives.     

Persuading Caesar: A new interpretation of Farquharson's problem

Merely because voting takes place in a real-life social decision system, we are not thereby confronted by a ‘voting game’. Often we are confronted by something that looks more like an advising game, in which voting is mainly important as a language by which policymakers render advice to other policymakers (possibly including their own future selves) who will act later. In this brief research note, the foregoing theme is illustrated by re-interpreting the same case from ancient Roman senatorial politics which inspired Robin Farquharson's seminal Theory of Voting. I stress that the contributions of this article lie entirely in the interpretation of allegedly gamelike situations, not in the formal analysis of games proper.     

General Blotto: games of allocative strategic mismatch

The Colonel Blotto game captures strategic situations in which players attempt to mismatch an opponent’s action. We extend Colonel Blotto to a class of General Blotto games that allow for more general payoffs and externalities between fronts. These extensions make Blotto applicable to a variety of real-world problems. We find that like Colonel Blotto, most General Blotto games do not have pure strategy equilibria. Using a replicator dynamics learning model, we show that General Blotto may have more predictable dynamics than the original Blotto game. Thus, adding realistic structure to Colonel Blotto may, paradoxically, make it less complex.     

Deliberation in large juries with diverse preferences

This paper considers a game in which imperfectly informed jurors who differ in their thresholds of reasonable doubt must decide whether to convict or acquit a defendant. Jurors deliberate prior to voting on the fate of the defendant, and the defendant is convicted only if all jurors vote to convict. Although it has been established that full information revelation is impossible when jurors have sufficiently heterogeneous preferences, this paper demonstrates that if each juror shares preferences with a small fraction of the other jurors, it is possible to obtain enough information revelation so that the correct decision is made with probability arbitrarily close to one in large juries.     

Introducing “Cooperative Push”: How Inefficient Environmental Policy (Sometimes!) Protects the Global Commons Better

In this paper we argue that the incentive structures of the gamesnations play in international environmental negotiations dependupon the choice of environmental policy instruments. Bargainingon the use of some instrument (e.g. an effluent charge) mayput the players into a dilemma game (like Chicken). Negotiationsto apply a different instrument (say, an emission reductionquota) may lead to a cooperation game (like Stag Hunt). The higherthe incentive to cooperate in the type of game which is built upby a specific instrument, the higher is this instrument's``cooperative push''. Of course, comparing two instruments,the one with the higher cooperative push might well be the lessefficient one. In this Paper, we analyse a situation where thehigher cooperative push of an instrument overcompensates thisinstrument's lower efficiency: Aggregate welfare withbilateral cooperation (the equilibrium of Stag Hunt) is higher than withunilateral cooperation (the equilibrium of the Chicken game).The question remains whether sovereign countries decide to playStag Hunt ending up in the welfare superior equilibrium. It isshown below that they do not in an uncoordinated optimising setting.However, we develop a particular frame where the proposedsolution meets the criteria of individual rationality,stability and fairness. It thereby establishes the politically mostdesired result – international cooperation.     

A generalized model of rent-seeking behavior

In this paper I present a formal analysis of rent-seeking games in which the players' valuations for the prize are represented as vectors. The players in this game are risk neutral and may not be indifferent to who wins the contestable rent if it is someone else. Both Tullock's original rent-seeking model and the public goods rent-seeking model by Katz et al. turn out to be special cases of this more general model.     

博弈问题的哲学分析

自纳什以来,非合作博弈理论已经广泛应用于经济学、政治学、社会学、生物学等领域.本文从哲学角度分析了博弈中的理性和合作问题,试图指出,博弈论关于理性和合作的理解是非常单薄的,基本上局限于经济学的理解,而这可能误解人类行为.     

Cooperation among egoists in Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken games

Axelrod has developed an evolutionary approach to the study of repeated games and applied that approach to the Prisoners' Dilemma. We apply this approach, with some modifications in the treatment of clustering, to a game that has the Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken as special cases, to analyze how the evolution of cooperation differs in the two games. We find that the main barrier to the evolution of cooperation in Chicken is that cooperation may not always be correctly thought of as socially optimal, but that strong forces do push the players toward socially optimal action. We derive some of the results on mixed populations for any game with pairwise interaction.     

Rent-seeking behaviour of retaliating agents

This paper has examined a rent-seeking game where the players take a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the potential strategies and counter-strategies of their rivals than in the standard Nash case. We have derived the conditions for the existence of symmetric and nonsymmetric equilibria for the game and derived the properties of these equilibria. Three results merit repeating. First, we find that rent dissipation will not, in general, be complete. Second, and in contrast to much of the traditional literature, we find that the socially optimal result of zero rent-seeking is sometimes a feasible equilibrium outcome for our game. Finally, there exist rent-seeking configurations in which the best play of one of the rivals is to withdraw from the game or, alternatively stated, where it is not optimal for a rival to contest the rent by entering the game. In these nonsymmetric cases it would appear that Tullock's conjecture about the value of preemptive moves remains valid. This is true even when the strategies and counter-strategies available to the players are much more complex than in the traditional Nash approach.As a final point we raise the issue of whether or not it is reasonable to suppose that the players in rent-seeking games will take their strategy and counter-strategy sets to be as large as we have assumed in this paper. Players may well make their moves and counter-moves based upon rules of thumb or other considerations that effectively bound the strategy sets of the players. As well, it may be useful to consider games where players, upon entering the game, commit themselves to a given level of expenditures. Many of these issues are considered in a related paper by the authors.     

Constitutional Prohibitions in a Rent Seeking Model

I extend the standard rent seeking model to allow lobbying fora constitutional prohibition on wealth transfers. I examinetwo issues: (1) the ability of special interests withsignificant political capacity to block constitutional change;and (2) the effect of adding a constitutional stage on totallobbying expenditures. Defeating a prohibition on wealthtransfers is a public good for rent seekers; success inconstitutional politics merely allows them to lobby for wealthtransfers. The resulting collective action problem for rentseekers in constitutional politics offsets the generalinterest's free rider problems, reducing the probability oftransfers and expected total lobbying expenditures compared tothe traditional rent seeking contest. Introduction of aconstitutional stage also reverses several comparative staticsresults from the rent seeking game. An increase in the numberof rent seekers or the general interest's (consumers') abilityto organize increase lobbying in the rent seeking game butgenerally reduce expected lobbying in the constitutionalprohibition game.     

Game tree analysis of international crises

Conflicts among nations can often be understood as games in which players (nations) possessing strategies (the sets of actions they may take) face alternative consequences (loss or gain of territory or prestige) determined by their choices of action. Amenable to this type of analysis is the recent Falkland Islands crisis involving Argentina and Great Britain. The events in this case provide an illustration of the way “three-stage, two-person sequential game tree models” can explain the outcome of a crisis situation, whether the parties involved possess perfect information regarding the likely actions of their opponents or are subject to misperceptions about them. When misperceptions occur, the effects can be severely detrimental to both players. Under certain conditions a single misperception by a player of an opponent's preferences can lead to conflict even though both players would have preferred another outcome, one that would in fact have resulted if the error in perception had not occurred. Thus, the outcome of such a “game” is highly sensitive not only to the players' actual preferences but to mutual perceptions of those preferences.     

Fighting pollution when decisions are strategic

In this paper we analyse anti-pollution policies in a 2-by-2 game played between a “polluter” and the “police” in which the payoffs can be manipulated by an exogenous third player called the “policy-maker.” We show that the efficiency of the policies may depend on whether the players of the 2-by-2 game choose Nash equilibrium strategies or prefer maximin.     

Vote trading: An experimental study

This essay reports the results of ninety 3-person and 5-person bargaining experiments using several alternative vote trading scenarios. These experiments are designed to test: (1) Riker and Brams' controversial hypothesis that vote trading can yield inferior outcomes as against the alternative hypothesis that vote trading induces ‘market-like’ efficiency in voting bodies; (2) the relative adequacy of several game theoretic solution concepts for vote trading games without a Condorcet winner (core); and, (3) the adequacy of the core itself. First, on the basis of eighteen experiments with binding commitments, we find some support for Riker and Brams' hypothesis: in nine trials, subjects first trade to a Pareto dominated outcome. In five of these trials, however, these outcomes are eventually displaced by Pareto efficient ones. Without binding commitments, however, we find little support for the ‘paradox of vote trading’ hypothesis. Specifically, while six of seven trials of a 3-person game yield ‘equitable’ outcomes, seventeen trials of several 5-person games without binding commitments strongly support the competitive solution as a cooperative game solution concept, and suggest that the V-set and M ₁ bargaining set are either redundant or useless. Seven trials each of six 5-person games with a condorcet winner (core), however, suggest that usual static solution concepts may be inadequate for treating games with any interesting degree of strategic complexity.     

The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.     

传承与创新:党内巡视制度的历史性资源及创造性转化

党内巡视制度是党内监督的重要形式,是全面从严治党的制度保障。我国巡视制度的历史源远流长,形成了相对完备的制度体系,积累了丰富的巡视监督经验:巡视主体的独立性、巡视监督的权威性、巡视运行的规范性,成为党内巡视制度可借鉴的历史资源。国家结构的单一性传统、监督结构的相似性形式和历史文化的延续性基础为批判地借鉴古代巡视制度提供了条件。党内巡视制度在汲取历史资源和养分的基础上,进行创造性转化和创新性发展,构建了全面巡视和重点聚焦相统一的巡视布局,组织监督和民主监督相统一的监督模式,政治巡视与业务监督相统一的巡察内容,同体监督和异体监督相统一的监督机制,发现问题与解决问题相统一的巡视过程,形成新时代中国特色的党内巡视制度体系。     

Interstate tax competition after TRA86

When a governor announces that a tax increase is necessary, how do voters decide whether the governor is representing the situation honestly, or just preparing to line his or her pockets? This paper presents evidence that voters may look at the tax increases in neighboring states to obtain information on whether a tax increase is appropriate and, using this information, decide whether to reelect their governor. The data suggest that comparisons with neighbors influence gubernatorial behavior: Governors are more likely to raise taxes when neighbors are doing the same. TRA86 allows us an extra check on the rnodelpresented: I f the marginal dollar taken in state taxes is more costly to state residents, this may increase the extent to which residents use information provided through neighboring states to sort good governors from bad.     

The Confidence Game: Of Others and of Bernard Madoff

This is the first in a series of five articles focusing on how Bernard Madoff’s confidence game (con game) worked. This paper first examines three con games in order to isolate their common elements. What went on in Madoff’s offices is generally what goes on in most con games: extensive preparations, elaborate props, pretense, victims convinced that they have much to win and little to lose, greed, and the ability to disorient and fool. Little in Madoff’s world was what it seemed to be.     

The meanings of production(s): showbiz and deep plays in finance and DIYbiology

Drawing on anthropological theories of play, deep play and games, as well as sociological interaction theories of risk, this paper develops a theory of consequential games. This paper suggests that in the United States much expert or entrepreneurial activity can be seen as a competition over creating the rules of games that others must play. In turn, whatever peril lies in these consequential games is the province of the saps that have to play, and whatever reward or prize comes from the game is captured by the expert or entrepreneur. The perspective that this paper advances, in turn, renders domains of life often seen as discrete (say private equity investing and biotechnological tinkering) comparable and in fact similar types of phenomena, all caught up in the crazy apocalyptic vitality that is contemporary capitalism.