Caller Number Five: Timing Games that Morph From One Form to Another

No 871, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: There are two well-studied timing games in economics: In a War of Attrition, having more predecessors helps; in a Pre-emption Game, more predecessors hurts. This paper introduces and explores a rich new spanning class of timing games with _rank-order payoffs_ that subsumes both timing games as special cases. This explains a wide array of economic and social timing phenomena. Indeed, assuming unobserved actions and complete information, we identify equilibria that display both smooth and explosive entry. Anticipation of later timing games influences current play --- from swelling the magnitude of pre-emptive explosions to truncating wars of attrition. We provide conditions for existence, characterize equilibria, and compare outcomes under unobservable and observable actions. Both settings' equilibria show similarities, and the unobservable actions case provides intuitive insights as to likely equilibria with observable actions. The analysis turns in part on Karlin's 1968 theory of total positivity.

Keywords: game; theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written 2004
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~apark/caller_5_theory.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: Caller Number Five: Timing Games that Morph from One Form to Another (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics
Address: Society for Economic Dynamics Anne Stubing CV Starr Center for Applied Economics 269 Mercer Street, Room 303 New York University New York, NY 10003
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().