Mental Equilibrium and Rational Emotions

Eyal Winter (), Ignacio Garcia-Jurado, Jose Mendez-Naya and Luciano Mendez-Naya

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: We introduce emotions into an equilibrium notion. In a mental equilibrium each player "selects" an emotional state which determines the player's preferences over the outcomes of the game. These preferences typically differ from the players' material preferences. The emotional states interact to play a Nash equilibrium and in addition each player's emotional state must be a best response (with respect to material preferences) to the emotional states of the others. We discuss the concept behind the definition of mental equilibrium and show that this behavioral equilibrium notion organizes quite well the results of some of the most popular experiments in the experimental economics literature. We shall demonstrate the role of mental equilibrium in incentive mechaisms and will discuss the concept of collective emotions, which is based on the idea that players can coordinate their emotional states.

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-neu and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp521.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp521.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp521.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:huj:dispap:dp521

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Simkin ().