Social Ties and Money Priming in Bargaining Games and the Prisoner‘s Dilemma

The authors examine the effects of money priming and solidarity on individual behavior in three simple games: dictator, ultimatum, and prisoner's dilemma game. In three consecutive experiments, they use two different money treatments and two neutral (control) treatments. Additionally, they vary the strength of social ties between participants by conducting experiments with students from a military university and a regular university. Although the priming procedure is sufficient to remind people of the concept of money, it is not sufficient to induce systematically different behavior of the treatment groups compared to the control groups. They find significant differences between groups with strong and weak social ties, even without activating the idea of group affiliation. They discuss various explanations of why the results seem to contradict previous research on money priming.

Stability concepts in bargaining games

In this thesis we discuss some novel concepts of stability in bargaining games, over a network setting. So far, the studies on bargaining games were done as profit sharing problems, whose underlying combinatorial optimization problems are of packing type. In our work, we study bargaining games from a cost sharing perspective, where the underlying combinatorial optimization problems are covering type problems. Unlike previous studies, where bargaining processes are restricted to only two players, we study bargaining games over a more generic hypergraph setting, which allows any bargaining process to be formed among any number of players. In previous studies of bargaining games, the objects that are being negotiated are assumed to be uniform and only the outcomes of the negotiations are allowed to be different. However, in our study, we accommodate possibilities of non-uniform weights of the objects that are being negotiated, which is closer to any real life scenario. Finally we extend our study to incorporate socially aware players by introducing a relaxed and innovative definition of stability.

Stability concepts in bargaining games

In this thesis we discuss some novel concepts of stability in bargaining games, over a network setting. So far, the studies on bargaining games were done as profit sharing problems, whose underlying combinatorial optimization problems are of packing type. In our work, we study bargaining games from a cost sharing perspective, where the underlying combinatorial optimization problems are covering type problems. Unlike previous studies, where bargaining processes are restricted to only two players, we study bargaining games over a more generic hypergraph setting, which allows any bargaining process to be formed among any number of players. In previous studies of bargaining games, the objects that are being negotiated are assumed to be uniform and only the outcomes of the negotiations are allowed to be different. However, in our study, we accommodate possibilities of non-uniform weights of the objects that are being negotiated, which is closer to any real life scenario. Finally we extend our study to incorporate socially aware players by introducing a relaxed and innovative definition of stability.

Environmental valuation using bargaining games: an application to water

We characterize a general bargaining game useful for environmental valuation purposes. In this game, a jointly endowed asset is divisible into smaller units of two types: those with and without an associated costly attribute. Bargaining parties can use monetary transfers to their counterpart in exchange for accruing more units of the jointly endowed asset. We show that the cost of the attribute is perfectly absorbed by the transfer in a broad set of game solutions. Outcomes differing in the allocation of the units with the costly attribute allows us to identify whether the players' valuation of the attribute corresponds to its value induced in the game (i.e., its cost) or whether this attribute is over-or under-valued. We show an application to the valuation of water in a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted with Colombian farmers. We find evidence that the players' valuation of in-plot access to water dwells between 2.1 and 3.5 times its induced cost in the experiment.