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The Kemeny rule is one of the well studied decision rules. In this paper we show that the Kemeny rule is the only rule which is unbiased, monotone, strongly tie-breaking, strongly gradual, and weighed tournamental. We show that these conditions are logically independent.

We study bargaining models in discrete time with a finite number of players, stochastic selection of the proposing player, endogenously determined sets and orders of responders, and a finite set of feasible alternatives. The standard optimality conditions and system of recursive equations may not be sufficient for the existence of a subgame perfect equilibrium in stationary strategies (SSPE) in case of costless delay. We present a characterization of SSPE that is valid for both costly and costless delay. We address the relationship between an SSPE under costless delay and the limit of SSPEs under vanishing costly delay. An SSPE always exists when delay is costly, but not necessarily so under costless delay, even when mixed strategies are allowed for. This is surprising as a quasi SSPE, a solution to the optimality conditions and the system of recursive equations, always exists. The problem is caused by the potential singularity of the system of recursive equations, which is intimately related to the possibility of perpetual disagreement in the bargaining process.

The subgame perfect equilibrium in stationary strategies (SSPE) is the most important solution concept in applications of stochastic games, making it imperative to develop efficient methods to compute an SSPE. For this purpose, this paper develops an interior-point differentiable path-following method (IPM), which establishes a connection between an artificial logarithmic barrier game and the stochastic game of interest by adding a homotopy variable. IPM brings several advantages over the existing methods for stochastic games. On the one hand, IPM provides a bridge between differentiable path-following methods and interior-point methods and remedies several issues of an existing homotopy method called the stochastic linear tracing procedure (SLTP). First, the starting stationary strategy profile can be arbitrarily chosen. Second, IPM does not need switching between different systems of equations. Third, the use of a perturbation term makes IPM applicable to all stochastic games rather than generic games only. Moreover, a well-chosen transformation of variables reduces the number of equations and variables by roughly one half. Numerical results show that the proposed method is more than three times as efficient as SLTP. On the other hand, the stochastic game can be reformulated as a mixed complementarity problem and solved by the PATH solver. We employ the proposed IPM and the PATH solver to compute SSPEs. Numerical results evince that for some stochastic games the PATH solver may fail to find an SSPE, whereas IPM is successful in doing so for all stochastic games, which confirms the reliability and stability of the proposed method. Summary of Contribution: This paper incorporates the interior-point methods into a differentiable path-following method for computing stationary equilibria for stochastic games. This novel method brings excellent computational advantages and remedies several issues with the existing methods for stochastic games. We prove the global convergence of the proposed method and employ this method to solve numerous randomly generated stochastic games with different scales. Numerical results further confirm the high efficiency, stability, and universality of this method for stochastic games.

We consider a model where the same group of players is involved in more than one cooperative (transferable utility) game. A rule determines the payoffs per game, and for each player a utility function evaluates the resulting vector of payoffs. We assume that each player, independently, can make transfers of worth between different games, thereby affecting its payoff vector and, thus, utility. Two transfer systems are considered, resulting in two distinct noncooperative games, and the focus of the paper is on establishing existence and a characterization of Nash equilibria in these games. (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.

This paper analyzes price collusion in a repeated game with two submarkets; a standard and a premium quality segment. Within this setting, we study four types of price-fixing agreement: (i) a segment-wide cartel in the premium submarket only, (ii) a segment-wide cartel in the standard submarket only, (iii) two segment-wide cartels, and (iv) an industry-wide cartel. We present a complete characterization of the collusive pricing equilibrium and examine the corresponding effeect on market shares and welfare. Partial cartels operating in a sufficiently large segment lose market share and the industry-wide cartel prefers to maintain market shares at pre-collusive levels. The impact on consumer and social welfare critically depends on the cost of producing quality. Moreover, given that there is a cartel, more collusion can be beneficial for society as a whole.

We study games with almost perfect information and an infinite time horizon. In such games, at each stage, the players simultaneously choose actions from finite action sets, knowing the actions chosen at all previous stages. The payoff of each player is a function of all actions chosen during the game. We define and examine the new condition of individual upper semicontinuity on the payoff functions, which is weaker than upper semicontinuity. We prove that a game with individual upper semicontinuous payoff functions admits a subgame perfect $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -equilibrium for every $$\epsilon >0$$ ϵ > 0 , in eventually pure strategy profiles.

Combining management research with infectious disease epidemiology, we propose a new perspective on mental disorders in a business context. We suggest that—similar to infectious diseases—clinical diagnoses of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders can spread epidemically across the boundaries of organizations via social contagion. We propose a framework for assessing the patterns of disease transmission, with employee mobility as the driver of contagion across organizations. We empirically test the proposed mental disorder transmission patterns by observing more than 250,000 employees and more than 17,000 Danish firms over a period of 12 years. Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.

We critically assess the representative consumer with quadratic aggregate utility function which forms the foundation of a well-known class of linear oligopoly demand structures. It is argued that this approach is problematic and redundant. Regarding the latter, we show how the same demand system can be derived directly from a population of heterogeneous buyers for any number of products. Welfare analyses based on aggregate demand is shown to be sensitive to the underlying microfoundation.

Motivated by some recent examples, this paper employs a model of public law enforcement to explain why it may not be in society’s interest to send criminals to prison. We establish two main findings. First, independent of the lawbreaker’s societal position, imprisonment is suboptimal when the harm from the illegal activity is sufficiently small. Second, for a given level of harm, imprisonment is suboptimal when the lawbreaker is sufficiently important. This latter result thus provides a rationale for why some parties are taken to be ‘too big to jail’.

In a local interaction model agents situated on a circle play bilateral prisoners’ dilemmas with their immediate neighbors and have three possible strategies: cooperate in all interactions (altruistic), defect in all interactions (egoistic), or cooperate with one immediate neighbor with probability 1=2 (partial cooperation). After each period the agents adopt the strategy with the highest average payoff in their observed local neighborhood (naive imitation). The absorbing states of the process are outlined and analysed. There does not exist an absorbing state in which the partially cooperative strategy coexists with any of the other strategies. The partially cooperative strategy limits the diffusion of altruistic behavior in the population. Even though clustering of altruists is generally beneficial for sustaining altruism, relatively big groups of altruists at the onset actually enable the spread of the partially cooperative strategy.

In the context of Bayesian Persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow in Am Econ Rev 101:2590-2615, 2011), typically, a biased Sender designs a signal to influence the binary decision of an unbiased Receiver. Can the Receiver improve her payoffs by adopting a resistance strategy, i.e., by committing into incurring (deterministic or stochastic) costs if she picks the Sender-preferred action? We argue that deterministic resistance strategies cannot improve the Receiver's payoffs, whereas stochastic resistance strategies can increase both the informativeness of the signal and the Receiver's payoffs. We fully characterize the optimal resistance strategy and show that it always induces a substantial increase in the Receiver's welfare, as well as a perfectly informative signal.

We introduce a discrete-time search game, in which two players compete to find an object first. The object moves according to a time-varying Markov chain on finitely many states. The players know the Markov chain and the initial probability distribution of the object, but do not observe the current state of the object. The players are active in turns. The active player chooses a state, and this choice is observed by the other player. If the object is in the chosen state, this player wins and the game ends. Otherwise, the object moves according to the Markov chain and the game continues at the next period. We show that this game admits a value, and for any error-term $\veps>0$, each player has a pure (subgame-perfect) $\veps$-optimal strategy. Interestingly, a 0-optimal strategy does not always exist. The $\veps$-optimal strategies are robust in the sense that they are $2\veps$-optimal on all finite but sufficiently long horizons, and also $2\veps$-optimal in the discounted version of the game provided that the discount factor is close to 1. We derive results on the analytic and structural properties of the value and the $\veps$-optimal strategies. Moreover, we examine the performance of the finite truncation strategies, which are easy to calculate and to implement. We devote special attention to the important time-homogeneous case, where additional results hold., 34 pages, 2 figures

When employees use public settings such as team meetings to engage in voice-the expression of work ideas or concerns, they can spur useful discussions, action planning, and problem solving. However, we make the case that managers, whose support is essential for voice to have a functional impact, are averse to publicly expressed voice and prefer acting on voice that is privately brought up to them in one-on-one settings. Drawing on face management theory (Goffman, 1967), we argue that voice expressed in front of an audience, compared with that expressed one-on-one, is more threatening to the image that managers seek to portray as competent and unerring leaders, and that leads managers to respond more defensively to public voice and endorse it less. This, we propose, is especially true when the relationship quality between manager and employee is weak as public voice from relationally distant employees is perceived as a stronger challenge. Across five studies (correlational and experimental), we find support for our arguments and rule out alternative explanations such as that managers are aversive to public voice because it threatens their ego or that managers feel more accountable to act on publicly provided input. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an ongoing phenomenon: Virtual Teams (VTs) are now a ubiquitous feature of organizations. This undeniable transformation of the way individuals and teams work brings challenges for vital team processes, including coordination, information exchange, and interpersonal relationships, as well as for many other fundamental aspects, such as leadership or emotional exchanges. Understanding the specificity of Virtual teams is the reason behind this Special Section. We aim at pushing research on virtual teams forward, by widening theoretical frameworks that explore the experience of teamworking virtually. In this editorial, we introduce the collected papers highlighting their contributions, and describe four avenues to shape future research on VTs, motivated by those papers.

This article studies the role of central bank governors in monetary policy decisions taken by a committee. To carry out this analysis, we constructed a novel dataset of committee voting behaviour for six OECD countries for up to three decades. Using a range of Taylor rule specifications, we show that a change in governor significantly affects interest rate setting. We also observe systematic differences in interest rate rules based on the political party appointing the governor, with more inflation-averse policies under governors that are appointed by a right-wing political authority. We show the robustness of this result by using a wider dataset (including over 3000 observations from 12 countries). (JEL codes: E02, E5, P16)

We present a general existence result for a type of equilibrium in normal-form games, which extends the concept of Nash equilibrium. We consider nonzero-sum normal-form games with an arbitrary number of players and arbitrary action spaces. We impose merely one condition: the payoff function of each player is bounded. We allow players to use finitely additive probability measures as mixed strategies. Since we do not assume any measurability conditions, for a given strategy profile the expected payoff is generally not uniquely defined, and integration theory only provides an upper bound, the upper integral, and a lower bound, the lower integral. A strategy profile is called a legitimate equilibrium if each player evaluates this profile by the upper integral, and each player evaluates all his possible deviations by the lower integral. We show that a legitimate equilibrium always exists. Our equilibrium concept and existence result are motivated by Vasquez (2017), who defines a conceptually related equilibrium notion, and shows its existence under the conditions of finitely many players, separable metric action spaces and bounded Borel measurable payoff functions. Our proof borrows several ideas from (Vasquez (2017)), but is more direct as it does not make use of countably additive representations of finitely additive measures by (Yosida and Hewitt (1952)).

This paper investigates static games with unawareness, where players may be unaware of some of the choices that can be made. That is, different players may have different views on the game. We propose an epistemic model that encodes players' belief hierarchies on choices and views, and use it to formulate the basic reasoning concept of common belief in rationality . We do so for two scenarios: one in which we only limit the possible views that may enter the players' belief hierarchies, and one in which we fix the players' belief hierarchies on views. For both scenarios we design a recursive elimination procedure that yields for every possible view the choices that can rationally be made under common belief in rationality. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Why do we share fake news? Despite a growing body of freely-available knowledge and information fake news has managed to spread more widely and deeply than before. This paper seeks to understand why this is the case. More specifically, using an experimental setting we aim to quantify the effect of veracity and perception on reaction likelihood. To examine the nature of this relationship, we set up an experiment that mimics the mechanics of Twitter, allowing us to observe the user perception, their reaction in the face of shown claims and the factual veracity of those claims. We find that perceived veracity significantly predicts how likely a user is to react, with higher perceived veracity leading to higher reaction rates. Additionally, we confirm that fake news is inherently more likely to be shared than other types of news. Lastly, we identify an activist-type behavior, meaning that belief in fake news is associated with significantly disproportionate spreading (compared to belief in true news).

This paper develops a price competition duopoly model in which products are both horizontally and vertically differentiated. Firms each offer a standard and a premium product to buyers—some of whom are brand loyal. We establish the existence of a unique and symmetric competitive pricing equilibrium. Equilibrium prices are increasing in the degree of horizontal differentiation and the number of brand-loyal customers. The equilibrium price of the standard (premium) good is decreasing (increasing) in the quality difference and profits can increase in costs when this difference is large enough. If the pricing decision is taken at the product (division) level, then there is again a unique (and symmetric) competitive pricing equilibrium. Equilibrium prices and profits are lower than in the centralized case and demand for the standard product is higher when the quality difference is sufficiently large. Welfare is unambiguously lower with decentralized pricing.

This paper investigates the micro-foundations of pricing behaviour using monthly producer prices for Norwegian multi-product firms. We find both infrequent and many small price changes together with a high degree of within-firm synchronization. This points at fixed menu costs featuring scope economies, at additional linear and convex price adjustment costs, and at the presence of firm-specific shocks. The structural estimates and a simulation support the view that in order to understand pricing behaviour and the effectiveness of monetary policy, the analysis of multi-product firms and a richer price adjustment technology in the intermediate goods sector is valuable.

Dubins and Savage (How to gamble if you must: inequalities for stochastic processes, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965) found an optimal strategy for limsup gambling problems in which a player has at most two choices at every state x at most one of which could differ from the point mass $$\delta (x)$$ δ ( x ) . Their result is extended here to a family of two-person, zero-sum stochastic games in which each player is similarly restricted. For these games we show that player 1 always has a pure optimal stationary strategy and that player 2 has a pure $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -optimal stationary strategy for every $$\epsilon > 0$$ ϵ > 0 . However, player 2 has no optimal strategy in general. A generalization to n-person games is formulated and $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -equilibria are constructed.

In the digital age, the ability of organizations to create innovation is more important than ever before. By taking an employee perspective to digital transformation, we examine two important and inter-related cornerstones of organizational innovation—employees’ intrinsically motivated learning (i.e., their learning orientation) and employees’ willingness to speak up and raise constructive suggestions (i.e., their voice behavior). We conducted a survey study with 100 employees working in industries that are currently disrupted by digitization. Supporting the idea of self-determination theory, our findings show that digital transformation triggers employees to engage in an intrinsically motivated process during which they adopt a learning orientation, which consequently motivates them to express voice behavior. However, this beneficial process is counteracted by perceived surveillance via technology. When employees feel that digital transformation is accompanied by increased surveillance, they are less likely to adopt a learning orientation and therefore less likely to engage in voice behavior. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.

Correlated equilibrium constitutes one of the basic solution concepts for static games with complete information. Actually two variants of correlated equilibrium are in circulation and have been used interchangeably in the literature. Besides the original notion due to Aumann (1974), there exists a simplified definition typically called canonical correlated equilibrium or correlated equilibrium distribution. It is known that the original and the canonical version of correlated equilibrium are equivalent from an ex-ante perspective. However, we show that they are actually distinct - both doxastically as well as behaviourally - from an interim perspective. An elucidation of this difference emerges in the reasoning realm: while Aumann's correlated equilibrium can be epistemically characterized by common belief in rationality and a common prior, canonical correlated equilibrium additionally requires the condition of one-theory-per-choice. Consequently, the application of correlated equilibrium requires a careful choice of the appropriate variant. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We introduce the idea that a player believes at every stage of a dynamic game that his opponents will choose rationally in the future and have chosen rationally in a restricted way in the past. This is summarized by the concept of common belief in future and restricted past rationality, which is defined epistemically. Moreover, it is shown that every properly rationalizable strategy of the normal form of a dynamic game can be chosen in the dynamic game under common belief in future and restricted past rationality. We also present an algorithm that uses strict dominance, and show that it selects exactly those strategies that can be chosen under common belief in future and restricted past rationality.

Companies hit by a crisis of corporate misconduct typically need to issue a public apology to minimize reputational damage, negative word-of-mouth, and declining purchases. What such an apology should ideally convey, abstract or concrete information, remains up for debate. Working from construal-level theory, we test a contingency perspective on organizational apology effectiveness. According to construal-level theory, concretely formulated apologies are more effective when the apologizing company is psychologically near to (versus far away from) an apology-recipient. Second, abstractly formulated apologies are more effective when the apologizing company is psychologically far away from (versus near to) an apology-recipient. We found support for these hypotheses in three experiments (and provide a meta-analytic mean of both effects). In order to optimize effectiveness, apologies should be tailored to account for the psychological distance to the apology-recipient.

We consider collective evaluation problems, where individual grades given to candidates are combined to obtain a collective grade for each of these candidates. In this paper, we prove the following two results: (1) a collective evaluation rule is update monotone and continuous if and only if it is a min-max rule, and (2) a collective evaluation rule is update monotone and consistent if and only if it is an extreme min-max rule.

We consider the one-to-one two-sided matching with contracts model in which buyers face financial constraints. In this model there is a stable outcome, but not necessarily a competitive equilibrium as defined in the standard way. We propose a new equilibrium notion, quantity-constrained competitive equilibrium (QCCE) that allows buyers to form rational expectations on the lack of supply when their financial constraints are binding. We show the existence of QCCEs and establish the equivalence among QCCE outcomes, stable outcomes, and core outcomes. We also analyze the existence of QCCEs with uniform prices, the lattice property of QCCEs, and the rural hospital theorem of QCCEs. We finally examine the relation between models with financial constraints and models with price controls.

Psychological games enable us to study diverse motivations like anger, guilt, and intention-based reciprocity using models of rational strategic choice based on common belief in rationality (aka correlated rationalizability). This is achieved by letting utility depend not only on outcomes and beliefs about others' behavior but also on higher-order beliefs. It is an open question whether such belief dependent utilities can be made consistent with common belief in rationality in all empirically relevant cases. In this paper, we use a novel existence condition to show that common belief in rationality is possible for any empirically relevant case of belief-dependent utility. In addition, we present a recursive elimination procedure that characterizes common belief in rationality under minimal assumptions on belief-dependent utility functions. (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

Teams with shared leadership arrangements are ubiquitous in twenty-first century organizations. Although transitions in leadership are a common and key feature of such teams, there is little insight into how and when leadership arrangements transition over time. Bridging the shared leadership and team adaptation literatures, we present a model of Leadership Transitions in Teams to describe the adaptive process through which teams intentionally modify the existing leadership arrangement. The basic assumption underlying this model is that leadership transitions occur when there is a mismatch between the team’s needs and its current leadership arrangement. Such a mismatch results from an anticipated or observed change. If it is anticipated, team members can democratically discuss and try out a new leadership arrangement, preventing mismatch and thus lowered team effectiveness. In contrast, if the mismatch has already occurred, teams are more likely to adopt a less democratic process—either a coalition-based or intervening-based process—to change the leadership arrangement in their team to counteract faltering team effectiveness. We propose that the ways in which leadership transition episodes can unfold and relate to team effectiveness will depend on the type (determined by the timing of the leadership transition episode in relation to the change), approach (determined by the extent to which there is consensus on if and how to change the leadership transition episode), and boundary conditions of leadership transition episodes. We advance an agenda for research on leadership transitions in teams and outline practical implications for teams with shared leadership structures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, traditional (offline) chess tournaments were prohibited and instead held online. We exploit this unique setting to assess the impact of remote work policies on the cognitive performance of individuals. Using the artificial intelligence embodied in a powerful chess engine to assess the quality of chess moves and associated errors, we find a statistically and economically significant decrease in performance when an individual competes remotely versus offline in a face-to-face setting. The effect size decreases over time, suggesting an adaptation to the new remote setting.

Literature on Shared Mental Models (SMMs) has been burgeoning in recent years and this has provided increasingly detailed insight and evidence into the importance of SMMs within specific contexts. However, because past research predominantly focused on SMM structure as measured by diverse, context-dependent measures, a consolidated multi-dimensional measure of perceived SMMs that can be used across diverse team contexts is currently lacking. Furthermore, different conceptualizations of the dimensionality of SMMs exist, which further impedes the comparison between studies. These key limitations might hinder future development in the SMM literature. We argue that the field of SMMs has now matured enough that it is possible to take a deductive approach and evaluate the prior studies in order to refine the key SMMs dimensions, operationalizations, and measurement. Hence, we take a three-stage approach to consolidate existing literature scale-based measures of SMMs, using four samples. Ultimately, this leads to a 20-item five-dimensional scale (i.e., equipment, execution, interaction, composition, and temporal SMMs) – the Five Factor Perceived Shared Mental Model Scale (5-PSMMS). Our scale provides scholars with a tool which enables the measurement, and comparison, of SMMs across diverse team contexts. It offers practitioners the option to more straightforwardly assess perceived SMMs in their teams, allowing the identification of challenges in their teams and facilitating the design of appropriate interventions.

We investigate the degree and evolution of financial integration for 11 Asian equity markets for the period 2002-2018, using daily returns. We split up the sample period in three sub-periods to separately account for the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and also distinguish between three country groups, corresponding to their level of economic development. Using four measures of financial integration, we find that the level and speed of financial integration corresponds to the level of economic development. In addition, we find a steady evolution of financial integration when the GFC is appropriately accounted for. The crisis period itself yields mixed results, leading to caution in using this period for the analysis of financial integration.

This study aimed to identify and explain the mechanism underlying decision-making behaviors adaptive to AI advice. We develop a new theoretical framework by drawing on the anchoring effect and the literature on experiential learning. We focus on two factors: (1) the difference between individuals’ initial estimates and AI advice and (2) the existence of a second anchor (i.e., previous-year credit scores). We conducted two longitudinal experiments in the corporate credit rating context, where correct answers exist stochastically. We found that individuals exhibit some paradoxical behaviors. With greater differences and no second anchor, individuals are more likely to make adjustment efforts, but their initial estimates remain strong anchors. Yet, in multiple-anchor contexts individuals tend to diminish dependence on their initial estimates. We also found that the accuracy of individuals was dependent on their debiasing efforts.

To understand why and how competing firms such as Pfizer and BioNTech choose to join forces in their innovation process, this dissertation investigates the concept of coopetition – simultaneous collaboration and competition. Coopetition is risky, as partners remain rivals. To diminish risks, firms often draw on formal and informal tools (e.g. patents or secrecy) to protect their intellectual property from being exploited. Yet, the specific role of using such protection within coopetition remains unclear. Therefore, this dissertation studies firms’ likelihood to coopete depending on their chosen protection mechanisms, and how especially informal tools affect knowledge spillovers in coopetition for innovation. Moreover, this thesis acknowledges that many firms find themselves dealing with coopetitive portfolios – different combinations of collaboration partners with at least one competitor. Particularly, it explores which different partner blends increase or decrease a firm’s likelihood to innovate. Overall, this thesis provides evidence that collaboration between competitors can be beneficial for firms and society as a whole, if it is managed with care.

We propose a solution concept for social environments called social rationalizability with mediation that identifies the consequences of common knowledge of rationality and farsightedness. In a social environment several coalitions may and could be willing to move at the same time. Individuals not only hold conjectures about the behaviors of other individuals but also about how a mediator is going to solve conflicts of interest. The set of socially rationalizable outcomes with mediation is shown to be non-empty for all social environments and it can be computed by an iterative reduction procedure. We show that social rationalizability with mediation does not necessarily satisfy coalitional rationality when the number of coalition members is greater than two.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has held that the European Central Bank (ECB) enjoys considerable discretion in the formulation and implementation of monetary policy and that the application of the principle of proportionality should accommodate that discretion. This article reviews a large body of evidence to conclude that, in an uncertain and evolving economic environment, it is probably impossible for the ECB to conform with a strict interpretation of the principle of proportionality. Even conformity with the simpler interpretation of the ECJ is not fully explained in the seminal judgments in Gauweiler and Weiss. This incomplete explanation is especially true with respect to the weighing of divergent interests and exposes the ECB to future legal challenges.

Non-existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is a persistent problem in oligopoly models where sellers compete in prices and quantities. At the heart of this problem are unserved customers who are still willing to visit a less preferred supplier (i.e., so-called spillover demand). This note develops a consumer behavior model with spillover demand. Within this model there is a class of demand specifications for which a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium exists. This price-quantity equilibrium is shown to coincide with the Bertrand price equilibrium.

This paper examines the existence and characteristics of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in oligopoly models in which firms simultaneously set prices and quantities. Existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium is proved for a class of price–quantity games. If the demand function is continuous, then the equilibrium outcome is similar to that of a price-only model. With discontinuous demand and limited spillover, there are rationing equilibria in which combined production falls short of market demand. Moreover, there might again be an equilibrium reflecting the outcome of a price game. Competition in price and quantity thus yields Bertrand outcomes under a variety of market conditions.

In this paper, we consider choice functions that are unanimous, anonymous, symmetric, and group strategy-proof and consider domains that are single-peaked on some tree. We prove the following three results in this setting. First, there exists a unanimous, anonymous, symmetric, and group strategy-proof choice function on a path-connected domain if and only if the domain is single-peaked on a tree and the number of agents is odd. Second, a choice function is unanimous, anonymous, symmetric, and group strategy-proof on a single-peaked domain on a tree if and only if it is the pairwise majority rule (also known as the tree-median rule) and the number of agents is odd. Third, there exists a unanimous, anonymous, symmetric, and strategy-proof choice function on a strongly path-connected domain if and only if the domain is single-peaked on a tree and the number of agents is odd. As a corollary of these results, we obtain that there exists no unanimous, anonymous, symmetric, and group strategy-proof choice function on a path-connected domain if the number of agents is even.

The solution concept of iterated strict dominance for static games with complete information recursively deletes choices that are inferior. Here, we devise such an algorithm for the more general case of incomplete information. The ensuing solution concept of generalized iterated strict dominance is characterized in terms of common belief in rationality as well as in terms of best response sets. Besides, we provide doxastic conditions that are necessary and sufficient for modelling complete information from a one-person perspective.

In this report, we outline the key insights gained at the "Hello Diversity! Conference" held in June, 2019, at the Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany). The two-day event featured 14 talks from experts in academia and practice who shared their perspectives on how entrepreneurial diversity affects efforts to explore and exploit digital innovation opportunities. Their insights highlighted the lack of holistic knowledge on the topic, especially concerning the role that digital technologies play in fostering entrepreneurial diversity. The conference culminated in a "paperthon", which kickstarted interdisciplinary research projects that focus on better understanding entrepreneurial diversity in the digital age.

In light of increasingly age-diverse workforces, organizations face the challenge of fostering job satisfaction among both younger and older employees. Combining equity theory with an aging perspective, we propose that due to age-related shifts in motives and goals, younger versus older employees’ job satisfaction will depend differently on monetary rewards (outcome side of equity theory), task contributions (input side of equity theory), as well as on imbalances (inequity) in the relationship between monetary rewards and task contributions. In a multisource study with 166 managers, we found that while younger employees were satisfied primarily by monetary rewards, older employees were satisfied primarily by their task contributions. Most importantly, a three-way interaction indicated that younger versus older employees react differently to two types of inequity: Being proportionally over-rewarded (i.e., receiving high monetary rewards for low task contributions) reduced older (but not of younger) employees’ job satisfaction. By contrast, under-reward inequity (i.e., receiving low monetary rewards for high task contributions) decreased younger (but not of older) employees’ job satisfaction. These age-dependent effects of job features on job satisfaction reveal important theoretical as well as practical implications.

We introduce the so--called doubling metric on the collection of non--empty bounded open subsets of a metric space. Given a subset $U$ of a metric space $X$, the predecessor $U_{*}$ of $U$ is defined by doubling the radii of all open balls contained inside $U$, and taking their union. If $U$ is open, the predecessor of $U$ is an open set containing $U$. The directed doubling distance between $U$ and another subset $V$ is the number of times that the predecessor operation needs to be applied to $U$ to obtain a set that contains $V$. Finally, the doubling distance between $U$ and $V$ is the maximum of the directed distance between $U$ and $V$ and the directed distance between $V$ and $U$., Comment: 22 pages

We study elicitation of latent (prior) beliefs when the agent can acquire information via a costly attention strategy. We introduce a mechanism that simultaneously makes it strictly dominant to (a) not acquire any information, and (b) report truthfully. We call such a mechanism a robust scoring rule. Robust scoring rules are important for different reasons. Theoretically, they are crucial both for establishing that decision-theoretic models under uncertainty are testable. From an applied point of view, they are needed for eliciting unbiased estimates of population beliefs. We prove that a robust scoring rule exists under mild axioms on the attention costs. These axioms are shown to characterize the class of posterior-separable cost functions. Our existence proof is constructive, thus identifying an entire class of robust scoring rules. Subsequently, we show that we can arbitrarily approximate the agent's prior beliefs with a quadratic scoring rule. The same holds true for a discrete scoring rule. Finally, we show that the prior beliefs can be approximated, even when we are uncertain about the exact specification of the agent's attention costs.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test whether managers’ political skill is relevant for employees’ authentic leadership perceptions. Political influence theory assumes that political tactics seek to affect others’ interpretations of a person or situation. Thus, what matters for employees’ perceptions of their manager’s authentic leadership may be whether the manager actively seeks to show behavior that can be interpreted as authentic leadership. Combining political influence theory and gender stereotypes research, it is further suggested that manager gender moderates the employees’ interpretation of political influence attempts that are ambiguous. Design/methodology/approach Managers (n=156; 49.5 percent female) completed measures of their political skill. Employees (n=427; 39.1 percent female) completed measures of the manager’s authentic leadership. Findings Managers’ apparent sincerity was positively related to employees’ perceptions of managers’ authentic leadership; managers’ networking ability was negatively related to employees’ perceptions of female managers’ authentic leadership, but not of male managers. Research limitations/implications The methodology does not allow claims about causality. Originality/value Findings add knowledge of authentic leadership, such as difficulties that female managers face, and show the value of a fine-grained approach to political skill. Female managers should be aware that networking might have disadvantageous side effects. Conversely, sincere behavior attempts seem favorable for authentic leadership perceptions.

We consider domains in strategic voting problems which satisfy three properties, namely top-connectedness, pervasiveness, and richness. We prove the following two results for such a domain: (i) it admits non-dictatorial, unanimous, and strategy-proof choice functions if and only if it has an inseparable top-pair, and (ii) it admits anonymous, unanimous, and strategy-proof choice functions only if it does not have any top-circuit. Finally, we establish the practical relevance of our results by applying them in the context of locating a public good or a public bad, preference aggregations, policy making, etc.

We consider decision problems with arbitrary action spaces, deterministic transitions, and infinite time horizon. In the usual setup when probability measures are countably additive, a general version of Kuhn’s theorem implies under fairly general conditions that for every mixed strategy of the decision maker there exists an equivalent behavior strategy. We examine to what extent this remains valid when probability measures are only assumed to be finitely additive. Under the classical approach of Dubins and Savage (2014), we prove the following statements: (1) If the action space is finite, every mixed strategy has an equivalent behavior strategy. (2) Even if the action space is infinite, at least one optimal mixed strategy has an equivalent behavior strategy. The approach by Dubins and Savage turns out to be essentially maximal: these two statements are no longer valid if we take any extension of their approach that considers all singleton plays.

A payoff allocation in a bargaining problem is midpoint dominant if each player obtains at least one n th of her ideal payoff. The egalitarian solution of a bargaining problem may select a payoff configuration which is not midpoint dominant. We propose and characterize the solution which selects for each bargaining problem the feasible allocation that is closest to the egalitarian allocation, subject to being midpoint dominant. Our main axiom, midpoint monotonicity, is new to the literature; it imposes the standard monotonicity requirement whenever doing so does not result in selecting an allocation which is not midpoint dominant. In order to prove our main result we develop a general extension theorem for bargaining solutions that are order-preserving with respect to any order on the set of bargaining problems.

This paper studies adaptive learning in the class of weighted network games. This class of games includes applications like research and development within interlinked firms, crime within social networks, the economics of pollution, and defense expenditures within allied nations. We show that for every weighted network game, the set of pure Nash equilibria is non-empty and, generically, finite. Pairs of players are shown to have jointly profitable deviations from interior Nash equilibria. If all interaction weights are either non-negative or non-positive, then Nash equilibria are Pareto inefficient. We show that quite general learning processes converge to a Nash equilibrium of a weighted network game if every player updates with some regularity.