Games with Synergistic Preferences

Abstract: Players in economic situations often have preferences not only over their own outcome but also over what happens to fellow players, entirely apart from any strategic considerations. While this can be modeled directly by simply writing down final preferences, these are commonly unknown a priori. In many cases it is therefore both helpful and instructive to explicitly model these interactions. This paper presents a simple structure in the context of game theory, building on a model due to Bergstrom, that incorporates these ‘synergisms’ between players. It is powerful enough to cover a wide range of such interactions and model many disparate experimental and empirical results, yet straightforward enough to be used in many applied situations where altruism, or a baser motive, is implied.