Social welfare in search games with asymmetric information

Gilad Bavly, Yuval Heller and Amnon Schreiber

Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, vol. 202, issue C

Abstract: We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize's location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium that yields the first-best payoff (i.e., the highest social payoff under any strategy profile), and we characterize the first-best payoff. The results have interesting implications for innovation contests and R&D races.

Keywords: Incomplete information; Search duplication; Decentralized research; Social welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053122000527
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Welfare in Search Games with Asymmetric Information (2022)
Working Paper: Social Welfare in Search Games with Asymmetric Information (2020)
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:eee:jetheo:v:202:y:2022:i:c:s0022053122000527

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2022.105462

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().