Publications
Integrating Raiffa and Nash approaches to bargaining using interim agreements (with Kalyan Chatterjee), Games and Economic Behavior, July 2024, Vol. 146, pp, 105-120
Abstract: Raiffa's solution to the bargaining problem, outlined in Luce and Raiffa (1957), is the point where the negotiation curve - a sequence of points that constitute step-by-step improvements from the status quo in the feasible payoff space - meets (possibly in the limit) the efficient boundary of the feasible region. A bargaining model with interim agreements yields a negotiation curve in equilibrium (in the spirit of Raiffa), and as the bargaining frictions disappear, the Raiffa path of payoffs converges to the Nash solution.
Double Auction for Trading Perfect Complements (with Ashish Pandey), Journal of Public Economic Theory, February 2024, Vol. 26(1), 12672
Abstract: For a trading problem where a buyer is interested in an aggregate resource with fragmented ownership, the individually owned resources are perfect complements in trade. A double auction, chosen in accordance with a value alignment principle which we formulate, is shown to be strategy proof for owners. Since it also values the aggregate resource correctly, it mitigates the holdout problem by changing the source of inefficiency from complementarity on owners' side to lack of competition on buyer side. The value alignment principle implies that this double auction has a majority trading rule. With multiple buyers, a suitable modification makes the double auction strategy proof even for the buyers, thus mitigating the holdout problem by achieving approximate ex-post efficiency when the number of owners is large.
Cost of Efficiency in Trading Perfect Complements, Economics Letters, September 2023, Vol. 230, 111236
Abstract: For trade involving perfect complements and fragmented ownership, lower bounds on the deficit cost of supporting efficiency is provided by first providing informative estimates for the generalized VCG mechanism, then doing so for all incentive-feasible direct mechanisms, and finally for all voluntary trading mechanisms.
Stability and Efficiency in a Model of Production and Pillage, Indian Economic Review, November 2021, DOI: 10.1007/s41775-021-00125-6
Abstract: A collective choice model of an environment where a society must allocate but cannot legally enforce property rights over an indivisible productive asset is studied. Coalitions are heterogeneous in their productive abilities and power. As such, a coalition may either produce wealth from the asset or pillage the asset from less powerful coalitions. For a wide class of production and pillage technologies, a subset of the set of efficient states is supported as a Consistent Set of Chwe (Journal of Economic Theory 63:299–325, 1994). In this Consistent Set, implicit enforcement of property rights through expectations is sufficient to make efficiency stable; explicit legal enforcement is not necessary.
An Economic Model of the Last-Mile Internet (with Souvik Dutta and Kiriti Kanjilal), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, November 2021, Vol. 191, pp. 620-638
Abstract: Pricing decisions of an internet service provider (ISP) are studied in a model based on complementarity between broadband connection and content, congestion externalities on consumer side and oligopolistic externalities on content provider side. When consumers face two-part tariffs from the ISP, the equilibrium is sensitive to usage price level but is invariant to its structure on two sides. With nonlinear pricing, the markup of content providers affects consumer prices while congestion externalities and elasticity of content demand shape the price for providers. For the zero-price rule, a neutrality-of-policy result holds with two-part tariffs but not with nonlinear pricing.
Experimental Analysis of a Land Assembly Mechanism (with Kiriti Kanjilal), Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, April 2021, Vol. 91, pp. 101680
Abstract: Market mechanisms for land assembly problems suffer from a holdout problem and coercive legal solutions like eminent domain introduce new inefficiencies. A new mechanism that is not fully market-based but attempts price discovery is proposed, experimentally studied and is shown to improve efficiency. The mechanism is fully specified by two parameters - a percentile value of the empirical distribution of ask-prices that serves as a trading threshold for the buyer and a quantum of penalty to be applied to landowners who bid relatively very high. In a 2 by 2 treatment, it is found that reducing the trading threshold and increasing the penalty improves the efficiency performance.
Fairness and Partial Coercion in Land Assembly, Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, Volume 120, pp 325-335
Abstract: A holdout problem arises in a land assembly environment in which one buyer is interested in a large landmass characterized by fragmented ownership among many landowners. A simple holdout-resolving mechanism is obtained that asymptotically (as the number of landowners increase) solves a mechanism design problem with two novel criteria. One, a partial coercion constraint that respects property rights only in an 'aggregate' sense; and two, a fairness constraint that requires the terms of trade (per unit area) to be the same for every landowner. The mechanism is budget-balanced, semi-anonymous, weakly strategy-proof and non-coercive for the buyer while also being strategy-proof in the large for landowners.
Efficient Coalitional Bargaining with Noncontingent Offers, Games and Economic Behavior, 2016, Volume 100, pp. 125-141
Abstract: A new feature pertaining to proposer's ability to implement offers is introduced in the extensive form bargaining mechanism studied in Okada (1996). This mechanism is used to analyze the coalitional setting of strictly supermodular games. The new feature in the mechanism is that the proposer has a choice to implement his proposal with any subset of responders who have accepted it. Thus the institutional feature of 'every responder has veto power' is relaxed here. It is shown that for all sufficiently high discount factors, there exists an efficient subgame perfect equilibrium in pure stationary strategies (SSPE) whose limiting outcome is the core-constrained Nash Bargaining Solution. Moreover, all efficient SSPE are payoff-equivalent in the limit as the discount factor goes to 1.
Interdisciplinary Publications
Gopal S., Kaul S.K., Chaturvedi R. and Roy S., Coexistence of Age and Throughput Optimizing Networks: A Spectrum Sharing Game, 2021 IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking , forthcoming with DOI: 10 .1109 /TNET.2021 .3067900
Gopal S., Kaul S.K. and Chaturvedi R., Coexistence of Age and Throughput Optimizing Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach, 2019 IEEE , 30th Annual Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: Track 3 : Mobile and Wireless Networks.
Gopal S., Kaul S.K., Chaturvedi R. and Roy S., A Non-Cooperative Multiple Access Game for Timely Updates, IEEE INFOCOM 2020 , IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops.