Myrna Wooders

Myrna Wooders
Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Department of Economics

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79
Publications
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1,006
Citations

Publications

Publications (79)
Article
How does concern about genetic data privacy compare with other concerns? We conduct behavioral experiments to compare risk attitudes towards sharing genetic data with a healthcare provider with risk attitudes towards sharing financial data with a money manager. Both scenarios involve identical decisions and monetary stakes, permitting us to focus o...
Article
Full-text available
As recreational genomics continues to grow in its popularity, many people are afforded the opportunity to share their genomes in exchange for various services, including third-party interpretation (TPI) tools, to understand their predisposition to health problems and, based on genome similarity, to find extended family members. At the same time, th...
Article
Full-text available
We analyze a dynamic game where players can each make offers to other players to form coalitions. We show that these games have a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome that is individually rational and, when players can make enough proposals, Pareto optimal. We also provide sufficient conditions for equilibrium to implement core coalition stru...
Preprint
Full-text available
As recreational genomics continues to grow in its popularity, many people are afforded the opportunity to share their genomes in exchange for various services, including third-party interpretation (TPI) tools, to understand their predisposition to health problems and, based on genome similarity, to find extended family members. At the same time, th...
Article
Full-text available
Person-specific biomedical data are now widely collected, but its sharing raises privacy concerns, specifically about the re-identification of seemingly anonymous records. Formal re-identification risk assessment frameworks can inform decisions about whether and how to share data; current techniques, however, focus on scenarios where the data recip...
Article
Full-text available
In large quasilinear economies, we provide sufficient conditions to establish the nonemptiness of several versions of approximate interim cores with endogenous communication. This is done by proving nonemptiness of approximate ex post cores satisfying incentive compatibility. Our model features a finite number of agents whose information is exclusi...
Article
Full-text available
We study iterated matching of soulmates (IMS), a recursive process of forming coalitions that are mutually preferred by members to any other coalition containing individuals as yet unmatched by this process. If all players can be matched this way, preferences are IMS‐complete. A mechanism is a soulmate mechanism if it allows the formation of all so...
Article
Full-text available
This paper studies a multi-stage decentralized matching model where firms sequentially propose their (unique) positions to workers. At each stage workers sequentially decide which offer to accept (if any). A firm whose offer has been declined may make an offer to another worker in the next stage. The game stops when all firms either have been match...
Article
We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite but unbounded populations, where the set of possible projects for each jurisdiction/club is unrestricted in size. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs, which simply ensures that equal treatment payoffs are bounded above, we apply results...
Article
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Treating games of incomplete information, we demonstrate that the existence of an ex post stable strategy vector implies the existence of an approximate Bayesian equilibrium in pure strategies that is also expost stable. Through examples we demonstrate the ‘bounds obtained on the approximation’ are tight.
Article
In all social and economic interactions, individuals or coalitions choose not only with whom to interact but how to interact, and over time both the structure (the “with whom”) and the strategy (“the how”) of interactions change. Our objectives here are to model the structure and strategy of interactions prevailing at any point in time as a directe...
Article
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We discuss our experience in both commercial and open-access publishing. We argue that; in the papyrocentric (paper-centered) era before 1990; commercial publishers served a useful and necessary purpose. In the electronic era; post 2000; the academy has very little to gain from commercial publishers; who may actually impede rather than facilitate s...
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...
Article
We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second-mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental-standard levels. We introduce this feature to an otherwise familiar model of fiscal competition. Three...
Article
We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second mover advantage.' A key feature of standards is that, unlike public goods as usually defined, all firms do not unanimously prefer higher standard levels. We introduce this feature to an otherwise fami...
Article
Full-text available
We explore the potential for correlated equilibrium to capture conformity to norms and the coordination of behavior within social groups. Given a partition of players into social groups we propose properties that one may expect of a correlated equilibrium: within-group anonymity, group independence, predictable group behavior and stereotyped belief...
Article
In a seminal paper relating economic and game theoretic structures, Shapley and Shubik (1969) demonstrate that a game is a market game -- that is, a game derived from a finite-dimensional private goods exchange economy where all participants have continuous, concave utility functions. In this paper, to accommodate models of economies with public go...
Article
Full-text available
Coordination between agents can be modelled using correlated equi-librium and a 'device' allocating roles to players. That coordination takes place within a social context suggests properties that one may ex-pect of a correlated equilibrium. In this paper, given a partition of the player set into (social) groups, we demonstrate the existence of an...
Article
We show that, in a setting where tax competition promotes efficiency, variation in the extent to which firms can use public goods to reduce costs brings about a reduction in the intensity of tax competition. This in turn brings about a loss of efficiency. In this environment, a ‘minimum tax’ counters the reduction in the intensity of tax competitio...
Article
Full-text available
We explore the potential for correlated equilibrium to capture conformity to norms and the coordination of behavior within social groups. Given a partition of players into social groups we propose three properties one may expect of a correlated equilibrium: within-group anonymity, group independence and stereotyped beliefs. Within-group anonymity r...
Article
Thanks. Copyright 2008 Blackwell Publishing, Inc..
Chapter
Coalitions appear in an incredible diversity of economic and game-theoretic situations, ranging from marriages, social coalitions and clubs to unions of nations. We discuss some of the major approaches to coalition theory, including models treating why and how coalitions form, equilibrium (or solution) concepts for predicting outcomes of models all...
Article
Protests take place for a variety of reasons. In this paper we focus on protests that have a well defined objective that is in conflict with the objectives of the government. Hence the success or failure of a protest movement depends crucially on how the government responds. We assume that government types are private information so that government...
Article
We introduce a no-risky-arbitrage price condition (NRAP) for asset market models allowing both unbounded short sales and externalities such as trading volume. We then demonstrate that NRAP is sufficient for the existence of competitive equilibrium in the presence of externalities. Moreover, we show that if all risky arbitrages are utility increasin...
Article
In a classic model of tax competition, this paper shows that the level of public good provision and taxation in a decentralized equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the efficient state and, if so, whether this enta...
Chapter
A “law of scarcity” is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we demonstrate conditions under which all payoffs in the core of any game in a parameterized collection have an equal treatment property and show that equal treatment core payoff vectors satisfy a condition of c...
Chapter
This paper illustrates that an international permit trading system may hurt relatively poor countries by making associated economic activities unaffordable. A model is constructed in which the free market solution is Pareto inefficient as a result of pollution. The introduction of tradable permits allows pollution to be internalised, and brings abo...
Article
Full-text available
We consider the classic puzzle of why people turn out for elections in substantial numbers even though formal analysis strongly suggests that rational agents would not vote. If one assumes that voters do not make systematic mistakes, the most plausible explanation seems to be that agents receive a warm glow from the act of voting itself.ÊÊ However,...
Article
In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to that of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such conformity can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency requires the existence of a Nash or approximate Nash equili...
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite, but unbounded populations. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs we demonstrate nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate that the equal treatment core coincides with the set of price-taking equilibrium outcomes with a...
Article
Full-text available
Kalai (2002) demonstrates that in semi anonymous Bayesian games with sufficiently many players any Bayesian equilibrium is approximately ex-post Nash. In this paper we demonstrate that the existence of an approximate expost Nash property implies a purification result of the standard sort for the original Bayesian game. We also provide an example sh...
Article
We provide a new framework for the analysis of network formation and demonstrate the existence of farsightedly consistent directed networks. Our framework extends the standard notion of a network and also introduces the notion of a supernetwork. A supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks (the nodes) and represents (via the arcs...
Article
We make four main contributions to the theory of network formation. (1) The problem of network formation with farsighted agents can be formulated as an abstract network formation game. (2) In any farsighted network formation game the feasible set of networks contains a unique, finite, disjoint collection of nonempty subsets having the property that...
Article
Full-text available
Is conformity amongst similar individuals consistent with self-interested behavior? We consider a model of incomplete information in which each player receives a signal, interpreted as an allocation to a role, and can make his action choice conditional on his role. Our main result demonstrates that ‘near to’ any correlated equilibrium is an approxi...
Article
Full-text available
We consider a general equilibrium local public goods economy in which agents have two distinguishing characteristics. The first is 'crowding type', which is publicly observable and provides direct costs or benefits to the jurisdiction (coalition or firms) the agent joins. The second is taste type, which is not publicly observable, has no direct eff...
Article
This paper argues that, because governments are able to relax tax competition through public good differentiation, traditionally high-tax countries have continued to set taxes at a relatively high rate even as markets have become more integrated. The key assumption is that firms vary in the extent to which public good provision reduces costs. We sh...
Article
A “law of scarcity” is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we show that equal treatment core payoff vectors satisfy a condition of cyclic monotonicity. Our results are developed for parameterized collections of games and exact bounds on the maximum possible deviation of...
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...
Article
We model an economy with clubs (or jurisdictions) where individuals may belong to multiple clubs and where clubs sizes are arbitrary—clubs may be restricted to consist of only one or two persons, or as large as the entire economy, or anything in-between. Notions of price-taking equilibrium and the core, both with communication costs, are introduced...
Article
A 2law of scarcity2 is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we demonstrate conditions under which all payoffs in the core of any game in a parametized collection have an equal treatment property and show that equal treatment core payoff vectors satisfy a condition of cyc...
Article
Full-text available
Motivated by issues of imitation, learning and evolution, we introduce a framework of non-co-operative games, allowing both countable sets of pure actions and player types and player types and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, every mixed strategy Nash equilibrium can be used to construct a Nash e-equilibrium in pure st...
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...
Article
We consider a model of a local public goods economy with differentiated crowding that distinguishes between the tastes and crowding characteristics of agents. Crowding characteristics are those aspects of an agent that have a direct external effect on other members of the coalition to which he belongs. In such an economy, it is possible to form com...
Article
This paper studies a decentralised job market model where firms (academic departments) propose sequentially a (unique) position to some workers (Ph.D. candidates). Successful candidates then decide whether to accept the offers, and departments whose positions remain unfilled propose to other candidates. We distinguish between several cases, dependi...
Article
In has been frequently observed, in both economics and psychology, that individuals tend to conform to the choices of other individuals with whom thy identify. Can such conformity be consistent with self-interested behaviour? To address this question we use the framework of games with incomplete information. For a given game we first put a lower bo...
Article
In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence of a Nash equilibrium that induces a partition of the...
Article
Interpret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterised how large e must be, in terms of parameters describing individual games, fo...
Article
We introduce the framework of parameterized collections of games with and without sidepayments and provide three nonemptiness of approximate core theorems. The parameters bound (a) the number of approximate types of players and the size of the approximation and (b) the size of nearly effective groups of players and their distance from exact effecti...
Article
This paper shows how competition among governments for mobile firms can bring about excessive differentiation in levels of taxation and public good provision. Hotelling's Principle of Minimum Differentiation is applied in the context of tax competition and shown to be invalid. Instead, when an equilibrium exists, differentiation of public good prov...
Article
We formalize the interplay between expected voting behavior and strategic positioning behavior of candidates as a common agency problem in which the candidates (i.e., the principals) compete for voters (i.e., agents) via the issues they choose and the positions they take. A political situation is defined as a feasible combination of candidate posit...
Article
Full-text available
In the context of a socially networked economy, this paper demonstrates an Edgeworth equivalence between the set of competitive allocations and the core. Each participant in the economy may have multiple links with other participants and the equilibrium network may be as large as the entire set of participants. A clique is a group of people who are...
Article
Full-text available
Interpret a set of players with similar attributes who are all play-ing the same strategy as a society. Is it consistent with self-interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? By introducing a framework of approximate sub-stitutes in non-cooperative games we are able to put a bound on the 'in...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce a framework of noncooperative pregames, in which players are characterized by their attributes, and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, there exist approximate (e) Nash equilibria in pure strategies. In fact, every mixed strategy equilibrium can be used to construct an e-equilibrium in pure strategies, an ‘e-...
Article
In a series of papers (Kovalenkov and Wooders 2001a, Games and Economic Behavior, 2001b,Mathematics of Operations Research, and 1997, Journal of Economic Theory to appear), the authors have developed the framework of parameterized collections of games and also that of parameterized collections of economies with clubs. These papers apply to collecti...
Article
The main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games, introduced by Chwe (1994), can be applied to directed networks. Then, using Chwe's basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets for games, we show that for any given collection of directed networks and any given colle...
Article
We introduce the concept of a parameterized collection of games with limited side payments, ruling out large transfers of utility. With convexity of the payoff set of the grand coalition, we show that (1) a game with limited side payments has a nonempty epsilon-core and (2) when some degree of side-paymentness within nearly effective small groups i...
Article
We introduce consumption externalities into a general equilibrium model with arbitrary consumption sets. To treat the problem of existence of equilibrium, a condition of no unbounded arbitrage, extending the condition of Page (1987) and Page and Wooders (1993,1996) is defined. It is proven that this condition is sufficient for the existence of an e...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce the framework of noncooperative pregames and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, there exist approximate (E) Nash equilibria in pure strategies. In fact, every mixed strategy equilibrium can be used to construct an E-equilibrium in pure strategies — ours is an 'E-purification’ result. Our main result is that...
Article
Full-text available
During the nineties, Europe became a major recipient of FDIs but Italian regions have been largely excluded from this process. Was it due to their characteristics, or were Italian regions “doomed” by a negative country effect? In this paper we address this issue by estimating the determinants of multinational firms’ location choices in 52 EU region...
Article
Full-text available
The theory of equalising differences recognises that wage differentials may be required to equalise the attractiveness of alternative occupations. We examine this theory using the Conley/Wooders 'crowding types'' model. The crowding types model distinguishes between the tastes of a player and his crowding type, those attributes of the player that d...
Article
We examine a local public goods economy with differentiated crowding. The main innovation is that we assume that the crowding effects of agents are a result of choices that agents make. For example, agents may be crowded (positively or negatively) by the skills that other members of their jurisdiction possess and these skills may be acquired throug...
Article
We introduce price-dependent preferences, a form of externalities, into a general equilibrium model of an economy with short sales. The condition of ‘no unbounded arbitrage’, a similarity assumption on preferences and choice sets, is defined and shown to be sufficient for existence of an equilibrium, for balancedness of the economy, and for nonempt...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce a model of an local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite population. Under an especially mild condition of boundedness of per capita payoffs we show nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate that the equal treatment core coincides with the set of competitive allocations. Under...
Article
The 'crowding types' model of a local public goods economy makes a distinction between crowding effects and tastes of agents. Decentralization of the core is possible both with anonymous admission prices that depend only on publicly observable information and, when technology is linear, with Lindahl (per unit) prices. Lindahl price systems are supe...
Article
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The research agendas of psychologists and economists now have several overlaps, with behavioural economics providing theoretical and experimental study of the relationship between behaviour and choice, and hedonic psychology discussing appropriate measures of outcomes of choice in terms of overall utility or life satisfaction. Here we model the rel...
Article
We introduce a model of a cyclic game. Designed to take advatange of the recurring nature of certain economic and social situations, a cyclic game differs from an extensive form game in that a cyclic game does not necessarily have an end. The same situations, although with different players may be repeated infintely often. This feature makes a cycl...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a con-tinuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite, but unbounded pop-ulations. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs we demonstrate nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate that * We are indebted to 1 the equal treatment core coincides with the set of price-taking eq...
Article
In this note we study four different cone concepts used in the recent litera- ture. In the case of no half lines in indifference surfaces (NHL) we show that the arbitrage cone, the recession cone of the preferred set, coincides with the Page-Wooders increasing cone and with the closure of Chichilnisky's original global cone (cf., Chichilnisky 1995)...
Article
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Abstract One of the most important ideas in public economics is Tiebout's hypothesis that if public goods were \local" then markets would be able to overcome the free rider problem. In this paper we discuss the di®erent approaches to formally stating this idea as a decentralization theorem. Special attention is devoted to structure of the price sys...

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