Periodical states and marching groups in a closed owari

Owari is an old African game that consists of cyclically ordered pits that are filled with pebbles. In a sowing move all the pebbles are taken out of one pit and distributed one by one in subsequent pits. Repeated sowing will give rise to recurrent states of the owari. Bouchet studied such periodical states in an idealised setup, where there are infinitely many pits. We characterise periodical states in owaris with finitely many pits. Our result implies Bouchet's result.     

A note on coalitional manipulation and centralized inventory management

In this note we deal with inventory games as defined in Meca et al. (Math. Methods Oper. Res. 57:483–491, 2003). In that context we introduce the property of immunity to coalitional manipulation, and demonstrate that the SOC-rule (Share the Ordering Cost) is the unique allocation rule for inventory games which satisfies this property. The authors acknowledge the financial support of Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, FEDER and Xunta de Galicia through projects SEJ2005-07637-C02-02 and PGIDIT06PXIC207038PN.     

Dual-Role Based Pricing in a Dynamic and Competitive Environment

The dual role of price, as a product attribute signaling quality and as a measure of sacrifice, serving as a benchmark for comparing the utility gains from superior product quality, is now well established in the marketing and economic literature. However, knowledge about their long-run impact and the influence of competition on these effects still remains very sparse. In the current paper, with reference to a dynamic and competitive framework, an analytical model is proposed to help determining optimal decision rules for price incorporating both roles. The main results are as follows: (i) The optimal pricing policy is determined as a Nash equilibrium strategy. (ii) The resulting equilibrium price is higher than an equilibrium that disregards the carryover price effects. (iii) For a symmetric competition, we provide normative rules on how firms should set prices as a function of the perceived quality; particularly, how the price should be set initially, when there is little product familiarity and the perceived quality is low, and how this price should vary as the perceived quality increases. (iv) At steady state, we find that the level of equilibrium margin, in percentage terms, decreases with the elasticity of demand with respect to the brand price, but this decrease is moderated by the elasticity of demand with respect to the brand perceived quality, the cross elasticity of demand with respect to the competitor’s perceived quality and the effect of the competitor’s current price on the firm’s perceived quality deterioration. The author thanks Konstantin Kogan for helpful discussions and comments.     

半马尔可夫对策

本文考虑半马尔可夫随机对策.在一定条件下,我们证明随机对策有值函数,两个局中人相对于折扣报酬都有最优策略.     

The Böhm–Bawerk horse market: a cooperative analysis

Single–valued solutions for the case of two-sided market games without product differentiation, also known as Böhm–Bawerk horse market games, are analyzed. The nucleolus is proved to coincide with the τ value, and is thus the midpoint of the core. The Shapley value is in the core only if the game is a square glove market, and in this case also coincides with the two aforementioned solutions.Institutional support from research grants BEC 2002-00642, FEDER and SGR2001-0029 is gratefully acknowledged     

Terror and Counterterror Operations: Differential Game with Cyclical Nash Solution

The purpose of this paper is to study efficient measures to combat terror. To choose efficient actions against terror organizations, the response of terrorists has to be taken into consideration. Thus, an appropriate framework to study the intertemporal strategic interactions of Western governments and terror organizations is dynamic game theory. Using the open-loop Nash solution concept, it turns out that the system may exhibit long-run persistent oscillations. However, transitory behavior is nonunique.     

Economical tight examples for the biased Erd?s-Selfridge theorem

A positional game is essentially a generalization of tic-tac-toe played on a hypergraph (V,F). A pivotal result in the study of positional games is the Erd?s-Selfridge theorem, which gives simple criteria for the existence of a Breaker's winning strategy on a hypergraph F. It has been shown that the Erd?s-Selfridge theorem can be tight and that numerous extremal systems exist for that theorem. We focus on a generalization of the Erd?s-Selfridge theorem proven by Beck for biased (p:q) games, which we call the (p:q)-Erd?s-Selfridge theorem. We show that for pn-uniform hypergraphs there is a unique extremal system for the (p:q)-Erd?s-Selfridge theorem (q?2) when Maker must win in exactly n turns (i.e., as quickly as possible).     

Computing the cores of strategic games with punishment–dominance relations

In this paper, we discuss the computational complexity of the strategic cores of a class of n-person games defined by Masuzawa (Int J Game Theory 32:479–483, 2003), which includes economic situations with monotone externality. We propose an algorithm for finding an α-core strategy of any game in this class which, counting the evaluation of a payoff for a strategy profile as one step, terminates after O(n ³· M) operations, where M is the maximum size of a strategy set of any of the n players. The idea underlying this method is based on the property of reduced games. This paper is based on a part of the doctoral dissertation of the author. The author thanks Mikio Nakayama, Masashi Umezawa, William Thomson, an associate editor, and the anonymous referee for their helpful comments, suggestions, and advice. Thanks are also due to Yukihiko Funaki for a comment that led the author to this subject. The author is responsible for errors and inadvertencies.     

Random marginal and random removal values

We propose two variations of the non-cooperative bargaining model for games in coalitional form, introduced by Hart and Mas-Colell (Econometrica 64:357–380, 1996a). These strategic games implement, in the limit, two new NTU-values: the random marginal and the random removal values. Their main characteristic is that they always select a unique payoff allocation in NTU-games. The random marginal value coincides with the Consistent NTU-value (Maschler and Owen in Int J Game Theory 18:389–407, 1989) for hyperplane games, and with the Shapley value for TU games (Shapley in In: Contributions to the theory of Games II. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 307–317, 1953). The random removal value coincides with the solidarity value (Nowak and Radzik in Int J Game Theory 23:43–48, 1994) in TU-games. In large games we show that, in the special class of market games, the random marginal value coincides with the Shapley NTU-value (Shapley in In: La Décision. Editions du CNRS, Paris, 1969), and that the random removal value coincides with the equal split value.