Participation Games: Market Entry, Coordination and the Beautiful Blonde

Simon Anderson and Maxim Engers

No 5241, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We find the Nash equilibria for monotone n-player symmetric games where each player chooses whether to participate. Examples include market entry games, coordination games, and the bar-room game depicted in the movie 'A Beautiful Mind'. The symmetric Nash equilibrium involves excessive participation (a common property resource problem) if participants? payoffs are decreasing (in the number of participants), and insufficient participation if payoffs are increasing. With decreasing payoffs there can be many equilibria, but with increasing payoffs there are only three. Some comparative static properties of changing one player?s participation payoffs are counter-intuitive, especially with more than two players.

Keywords: Market entry; Coordination; Nash equilibrium; Mixed strategy equilibrium; Common property resource problem; Comparative statics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D43 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5241 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Participation games: Market entry, coordination, and the beautiful blonde (2007)
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:cpr:ceprdp:5241

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5241

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().