Games Editorial Office
Editorial: Acknowledgment to Referees
Games 2011, 2(4), 463-464; doi:10.3390/g2040463 - published online 20 December 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: Games has received help from many individuals since its inaugural issue in 2009. We are especially grateful to the following 146 referees for their great support of Games during the past two years.

Dimitri Migrow and Matthias Uhl
Article: The Resolution Game: A Dual Selves Perspective
Games 2011, 2(4), 452-462; doi:10.3390/g2040452 - published online 9 December 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: This article explains the emergence of an unique equilibrium resolution as the result of a compromise between two selves with different preferences. The stronger this difference is, the more generous the resolution gets. This result is in contrast to predictions of other models in which sinful consumption is distributed bimodally. Therefore, our result fits better with our daily observations concerning a lot of ambivalent goods where we often form nonrigid resolutions. The normative analysis uses the device of a hypothetical impartial self that regards both conflicting motives as equally legitimate. The result of this analysis is dilemmatic. It demonstrates that the resolution is broken too often to be welfare maximal. However, the introduction of external self-commitment devices results in their overuse and is welfare decreasing.

Pablo Brañas-Garza and Maria Paz Espinosa
Article: Unraveling Public Good Games
Games 2011, 2(4), 434-451; doi:10.3390/g2040434 - published online 21 November 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: This paper provides experimental evidence on how players predict end-game effects in a linear public good game. Our regression analysis yields a measure of the relative importance of priors and signals on subjects’ beliefs on contributions and allows us to conclude that, first, the weight of the signal is relatively unimportant, while priors have a large weight and, second, priors are the same for all periods. Hence, subjects do not expect end-game effects and there is very little updating of beliefs. We argue that the sustainability of cooperation is related to this pattern of belief formation.

Maroš Servátka , Steven Tucker and Radovan Vadovič
Article: Building Trust—One Gift at a Time
Games 2011, 2(4), 412-433; doi:10.3390/g2040412 - published online 27 September 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the trustor before both of them proceed to play the investment game. We observe that in such case the majority of trustees offer their endowment to trustors. Consequently, receiving a gift significantly increases the amounts sent by trustors when controlling for the differences in payoffs created by it. Trustees are, however, not better off by giving a gift as the increase in the amount sent by trustors is not large enough to offset the trustees’ loss associated with the cost of giving a gift.

Naoko Nishimura , Timothy N. Cason , Tatsuyoshi Saijo and Yoshikazu Ikeda
Article: Spite and Reciprocity in Auctions
Games 2011, 2(3), 365-411; doi:10.3390/g2030365 - published online 16 September 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: The paper presents a complete information model of bidding in second price sealed-bid and ascending-bid (English) auctions, in which potential buyers know the unit valuation of other bidders and may spitefully prefer that their rivals earn a lower surplus. Bidders with spiteful preferences should overbid in equilibrium when they know their rival has a higher value than their own, and bidders with a higher value underbid to reciprocate the spiteful overbidding of the lower value bidders. The model also predicts different bidding behavior in second price as compared to ascending-bid auctions. The paper also presents experimental evidence broadly consistent with the model. In the complete information environment, lower value bidders overbid more than higher value bidders, and they overbid more frequently in the second price auction than in the ascending price auction. Overall, the lower value bidder submits bids that exceed value about half the time. These patterns are not found in the incomplete information environment, consistent with the model.

Segismundo S. Izquierdo and Luis R. Izquierdo
Article: Strictly Dominated Strategies in the Replicator-Mutator Dynamics
Games 2011, 2(3), 355-364; doi:10.3390/g2030355 - published online 14 September 2011
Show/Hide AbstractAbstract: The replicator-mutator dynamics is a set of differential equations frequently used in biological and socioeconomic contexts to model evolutionary processes subject to mutation, error or experimentation. The replicator-mutator dynamics generalizes the widely used replicator dynamics, which appears in this framework as the extreme case where replication is perfectly precise. This paper studies the influence of strictly dominated strategies on the location of the rest points of the replicator-mutator dynamics, at the limit where the mutation terms become arbitrarily small. It can be proved that such limit rest points for small mutation are Nash equilibria, so strictly dominated strategies do not occur at limit stationary points. However, we show through a simple case how strictly dominated strategies can have an influence on the location of the limit rest points for small mutation. Consequently, the characterization of the limit rest points of the replicator-mutator dynamics cannot in general proceed safely by readily eliminating strictly dominated strategies.