About me

I am a Professor of Economics & Game Theory at the Institute of Economic Research at Kyoto University . I work on the incorporation of shared intentions and…

List of publications

Journal articles Coalitional stochastic stability, Games & Economic Behavior (2012). Recontracting and stochastic stability, Journal of Economic Theory (2012). Cheap talk and editorial control, BE Journal of Theoretical…

Humour and advice

An alternative guide for the young economist. Presented at the University of Sydney, Autumn 2016. Una guía alternativa para el economista joven. Versión en español, gracias a César…

Presentations

Winter School on the Evolutionary Foundations of Economic Behaviour, Brisbane 2023 — Link to event site. Population games & evolutionary dynamics. Slides. Reading list. Conventions & perturbed dynamics….

Deep and shallow thinking in the long run

Humans differ in their strategic reasoning abilities and in beliefs about others’ strategic reasoning abilities. Studying such cognitive hierarchies has produced new insights regarding equilibrium analysis in economics….

Stochastic dynamics and Edmonds’ algorithm

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in cyclic decompositions of stochastic dynamics. These decompositions consider the behavior of dynamics over the short, medium and long run,…

Geographic diversity in economic publishing

Is the representation of editors at prestigious economics journals geographically diverse? Using data on the affiliations of academics working in an editorial capacity at such journals, we map…

Conventions under heterogeneous behavioural rules

Strategies of players in a population are updated according to the behavioural rules of agents, where each agent is a player or a coalition of players. It is…

When does ambiguity fade away?

Consider an ambiguous situation in which there is a set of models of the world that are considered possible. We show that if this set of models is…

Evolution and Rawlsian social choice in matching

This paper considers the marriage problem under dynamic rematching. It is shown that if players who obtain higher payoffs are less likely to experiment with non-best response behavior,…

Maximality in the farsighted stable set revisited

Farsighted coalitional stability is the idea that when a coalition decides whether or not to deviate from a status quo, it considers further coalitional deviations that may occur…

Collaboration leads to cooperation on sparse networks

It is traditional in game theory to model cooperation as the play of a given strategy in a social dilemma. This approach is subject to the criticism that…

Agency, potential and contagion

We consider two fundamental forces that can drive the diffusion of an innovation on a network. The first of these forces is potential maximization, a method of aggregating…

Watercooler chat, organizational structure and corporate culture

Modeling firms as networks of employees, occasional collaborative decision making around the office watercooler changes long run employee behavior (corporate culture). The culture that emerges in a given…

Risk attitudes and risk dominance in the long run

This paper investigates the role that risk attitudes play in the evolution of conventions in the long run. Risk aversion is shown to be associated with the evolution…

Agency Equilibrium

Agency may be exercised by different entities (e.g., individuals, firms, households). A given individual can form part of multiple agents (e.g., he may belong to a firm and…

Evolutionary game theory: a renaissance

Economic agents are not always rational or farsighted and can make decisions according to simple behavioral rules that vary according to situation and can be studied using the…

Conventional contracts, intentional behavior and logit choice: Equality without symmetry

When coordination games are played under the logit choice rule and there is intentional bias in agents’ non-best response behavior, we show that the Egalitarian bargaining solution emerges…

Heterogeneity in preferences and behavior in threshold models

A coordination game is repeatedly played on a graph by players (vertices) who have heterogeneous cardinal preferences and whose strategy choice is governed by the individualistic asynchronous logit…

Shared intentions: the evolution of collaboration

The ability to form shared intentions and adjust one’s choices in collaboration with others is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We discuss the forces that act for…

The preferences of Homo Moralis are unstable under evolving assortativity

Differing degrees of assortativity in matching can be expected to have both genetic and cultural determinants. When assortativity is subject to evolution, the main result of Alger and…

Payoff dependent dynamics and coordination games

This paper considers populations of agents whose behavior when playing some underlying game is governed by perturbed best (or better) response dynamics with perturbation probabilities that depend log-linearly…

Stochastic stability in assignment problems

In a dynamic model of assignment problems, it is shown that small deviations suffice to move between stable outcomes. This result is used to obtain no-selection and almost-no-selection…

Emergence of shared intentionality is coupled to the advance of cumulative culture

There is evidence that the sharing of intentions was an important factor in the evolution of humans’ unique cognitive abilities. Here, for the first time, we formally model…

A one-shot deviation principle for stability in matching problems

This paper considers marriage problems, roommate problems with nonempty core, and college admissions problems with responsive preferences. All stochastically stable matchings are shown to be contained in the…

Coalitions, tipping points and the speed of evolution

This study considers waiting times for populations to achieve efficient social coordination. Belloc and Bowles (2013) conjecture that coalitional behavior will hasten such coordination. This turns out to…

Is it a norm to favour your own group?

This paper examines the relationship between norm enforcement and ingroup favouritism behaviour. Using a new two-stage allocation experiment with punishments, we investigate whether in-group favouritism is considered as…

Stochastic stability on general state spaces

This paper studies stochastic stability methods applied to processes on general state spaces. This includes settings in which agents repeatedly interact and choose from an uncountable set of…

Cheap talk and editorial control

This paper analyzes simple models of editorial control. Starting from the framework developed by Krishna and Morgan (2001), we analyze two sender models of cheap talk where one…

Recontracting and stochastic stability in cooperative games

An evolutionary style model of recontracting is given which guarantees convergence to core allocations of an underlying cooperative game. Unlike its predecessors in the evolution/learning literature, this is…

Coalitional stochastic stability

This paper takes the idea of coalitional behavior – groups of people occasionally acting together to their mutual benefit – and incorporates it into the framework of evolutionary…