There are two varieties of timing games in economics: Having more predecessors helps in a war of attrition and hurts in a pre-emption game. This paper introduces and explores a spanning class with rank-order payoffs} that subsumes both as special cases. We assume a continuous time setting with unobserved actions and complete information, and explore how equilibria of these games capture many economic and social timing phenomena --- shifting between phases of slow and explosive (positive probability) stopping.
Inspired by auction theory, we first show how the symmetric Nash equilibria are each equivalent to a different "potential function". This device straightforwardly yields existence and characterization results. The Descartes Rule of Signs, e.g., bounds the number phase transitions. We describe how adjacent timing game phases interact: War of attrition phases are not played out as long as they would be in isolation, but instead are cut short by pre-emptive atoms. We bound the number of equilibria, and compute the payoff and duration of each equilibrium.
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Paper provided by University of Toronto, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
tecipa-317.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Rida Laraki & Eilon Solan & Nicolas Vieille, 2003.
"Continuous-time Games of Timing,"
Discussion Papers
1363, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
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