Elon Kohlberg - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

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Elon Kohlberg

Baker Foundation Professor, Royal Little Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Strategy
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Elon Kohlberg is the Royal Little Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His research is mainly in Game Theory, in particular the study of non-cooperative equilibrium.

Professor Kohlberg has taught many courses in the MBA, Ph.D., and executive programs at Harvard Business School, including, Managerial Economics, Competitive Decision Making, Strategy, and Finance.  He is currently teaching the Advanced Microeconomics course in the doctoral program, as well as the elective MBA course Games of Chance and Games of Strategy.

Professor Kohlberg serves on the board of directors of Medinol and Digi-Block, Inc.  Previously, he served on the boards of Teva Pharmaceuticals and Ormat Technologies.

He received a B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Journal Articles

  1. Article | Games and Economic Behavior

    Games of Threats

    Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

    A game of threats on a finite set of players, N, is a function d that assigns a real number to any coalition, S ⊆ N, such that d(S) = -d(N\S). A game of threats is not necessarily a coalitional game as it may fail to satisfy the condition d(Ø) = 0. We show that analogs of the classic Shapley axioms for coalitional games determine a unique value for games of threats. This value assigns to each player an average of the threat powers, d(S), of the coalitions that include the player. Games of threats arise naturally in value theory for strategic games and may have applications in other branches of game theory.

    Keywords: Shapley value; coalitional game; Game Theory; Mathematical Methods;

    Citation:

    Kohlberg, Elon, and Abraham Neyman. "Games of Threats." Games and Economic Behavior 108 (March 2018): 139–145.  View Details
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Book Chapters

  3. Chapter | Future Competition in Telecommunications | 1989

    The Future Evolution of the Central Office Switching Industry

    Jerry A. Hausman and Elon Kohlberg

    Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Communication Technology; Forecasting and Prediction; Telecommunications Industry;

    Citation:

    Hausman, Jerry A., and Elon Kohlberg. "The Future Evolution of the Central Office Switching Industry." In Future Competition in Telecommunications, edited by Stephen P. Bradley and Jerry A. Hausman. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1989.  View Details
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Working Papers

  1. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

    Demystifying the Math of the Coronavirus

    Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

    We provide an elementary mathematical description of the spread of the coronavirus. We explain two fundamental relationships: How the rate of growth in new infections is determined by the “effective reproductive number” and how the effective reproductive number is affected by social distancing. By making a key approximation, we are able to formulate these relationships very simply and thereby avoid complicated mathematics. The same approximation leads to an elementary method for estimating the effective reproductive number.

    Keywords: coronavirus; Health Pandemics; Mathematical Methods;

    Citation:

    Kohlberg, Elon, and Abraham Neyman. "Demystifying the Math of the Coronavirus." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-112, April 2020. (Revised May 2020.)  View Details
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  2. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2017

    Cooperative Strategic Games

    Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

    We examine a solution concept, called the “value," for n-person strategic games. In applications, the value provides an a-priori assessment of the monetary worth of a player's position in a strategic game, comprising not only the player's contribution to the total payoff but also the player's ability to inflict losses on other players. A salient feature is that the value takes account of the costs that “spoilers" impose on themselves. Our main result is an axiomatic characterization of the value. For every subset, S, consider the zero-sum game played between S and its complement, where the players in each of these sets collaborate as a single player, and where the payoff is the difference between the sum of the payoffs to the players in S and the sum of payoffs to the players not in S. We say that S has an effective threat if the minmax value of this game is positive. The first axiom is that if no subset of players has an effective threat then all players are allocated the same amount. The second axiom is that if the overall payoff to the players in a game is the sum of their payoffs in two unrelated games, then the overall value is the sum of the values in these two games. The remaining axioms are the strategic-game analogs of the classical coalitional-games axioms for the Shapley value: efficiency, symmetry, and null player.

    Keywords: Game Theory;

    Citation:

    Kohlberg, Elon, and Abraham Neyman. "Cooperative Strategic Games." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-075, February 2017.  View Details
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  3. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2015

    The Cooperative Solution of Stochastic Games

    Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

    Building on the work of Nash, Harsanyi, and Shapley, we define a cooperative solution for strategic games that takes account of both the competitive and the cooperative aspects of such games. We prove existence in the general (NTU) case and uniqueness in the TU case. Our main result is an extension of the definition and the existence and uniqueness theorems to stochastic games—discounted or undiscounted.

    Keywords: game theory; economics; Game Theory;

    Citation:

    Kohlberg, Elon, and Abraham Neyman. "The Cooperative Solution of Stochastic Games." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 15-071, March 2015.  View Details
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  4. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2014

    The NTU-Value of Stochastic Games

    Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

    Since the seminal paper of Shapley, the theory of stochastic games has been developed in many different directions. However, there has been practically no work on the interplay between stochastic games and cooperative game theory. Our purpose here is to make a first step in this direction. We show that the Harsanyi-Shapley-Nash cooperative solution to one-shot strategic games can be extended to stochastic games. While this extension applies to general n-person stochastic games, it does not rely on Nash equilibrium analysis in such games. Rather, it only makes use of minmax analysis in two-person (zero-sum) stochastic games. This will become clear in the sequel.

    Keywords: Strategy; Game Theory;

    Citation:

    Kohlberg, Elon, and Abraham Neyman. "The NTU-Value of Stochastic Games." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 15-014, September 2014.  View Details
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  5. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2007

    Correlated Equilibrium and Nash Equilibrium as an Observer's Assessment of the Game

    John Hillas, Elon Kohlberg and John W. Pratt

    Noncooperative games are examined from the point of view of an outside observer who believes that the players are rational and that they know at least as much as the observer. The observer is assumed to be able to observe many instances of the play of the game; these instances are identical in the sense that the observer cannot distinguish between the settings in which different plays occur. If the observer does not believe that he will be able to offer beneficial advice then he must believe that the players are playing a correlated equilibrium, though he may not initially know which correlated equilibrium. If the observer also believes that, in a certain sense, there is nothing connecting the players in a particular instance of the game then he must believe that the correlated equilibrium they are playing is, in fact, a Nash equilibrium.

    Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Game Theory; Cooperation;

    Citation:

    Hillas, John, Elon Kohlberg, and John W. Pratt. "Correlated Equilibrium and Nash Equilibrium as an Observer's Assessment of the Game." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-005, July 2007.  View Details
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