Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T00:54:25.802Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2009

Get access

Summary

The ethnologist, Diamond Jenness, who was asked by the Canadian government in 1913 to join Stefansson's Arctic expedition to study Eskimos for three years, records the following in his diary:

Not all the cabins that stood empty had been vacated until the next winter … and from two poles dangled a score or more fox skins. It was the latter that particularly caught my attention. Here were what amounted to a year's earnings exposed wide open to the heavens, where the first passerby could appropriate them at his leisure. In reality, of course, they were as safe as in Brower's storeroom, for with a population so small, everyone always knew who was living where, and a pilferer had little or no chance of escaping detection.… honesty comes much more easily in a tiny community than it does in a great city, where misconduct always hopes that the multitude of alien tracks will cover up its own footprints. (Jenness, 1957, pp. 128–9)

Noncooperative, nonrepeated game theory is about strangers with no shared history, like the residents of Jenness' “great city.”They meet, interact strategically in their individual self interests according to well specified rules and payoffs, and never meet again.These stark conditions are necessary to ensure that the noncooperative, nonrepeated game theoretic prediction for the interaction is not part of a sequence with a past and a future.Thus, repeated games are analyzed differently because now strangers can potentially cooperate by developing their own history and future.

Type
Chapter
Information
Bargaining and Market Behavior
Essays in Experimental Economics
, pp. 90 - 126
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×