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- September 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Supplement
Wemade: (Re)Establishing Trust in Blockchain Games (B)
By: Jung Koo Kang, Charles C.Y. Wang, David Allen and Kwangmoon So
This supplement reviews Wemade's efforts to rebuild confidence in its business after its WEMIX coin was delisted from the major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges on December 8, 2022. It outlines Wemade's strategy of transparency, which included partnerships with... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Wemade: (Re)Establishing Trust in Blockchain Games (A)
By: Jung Koo Kang, Charles C.Y. Wang, David Allen and Kwangmoon So
This case explores the fundamental challenges and accounting issues arising from the integration of blockchain technology into traditional business models. It features Wemade, a South Korean online gaming company that has staked its future on blockchain-based games.... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Hacking the U.S. Election: Russia's Misinformation Campaign
By: Shikhar Ghosh
The case discusses the relatively low technology approach used by Russia to influence the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Although political parties manipulating the media was not a new phenomenon, the Russians ran a broad, well-financed, and sophisticated social... View Details
- November–December 2022
- Article
Can AI Really Help You Sell?: It Can, Depending on When and How You Implement It
By: Jim Dickie, Boris Groysberg, Benson P. Shapiro and Barry Trailer
Many salespeople today are struggling; only 57% of them make their annual quotas, surveys show. One problem is that buying processes have evolved faster than selling processes, and buyers today can access a wide range of online resources that let them evaluate products... View Details
- Article
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ali Cheema, Asim I. Khwaja and James A. Robinson
Lack of trust in state institutions is a pervasive problem in many developing countries. This paper investigates whether information about improved public services can help build trust in state institutions and move people away from non-state actors. We find that... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
To Infinity and Beyond: Scaling Economic Theories via Logical Compactness
By: Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Scott Duke Kominers and Ran I. Shorrer
Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often implicitly nonrobust; for example,... View Details
- August 28, 2018
- Article
Maintaining Trust When Agents Can Engage in Self-deception
By: Andres Babino, Hernan A. Makse, Rafael Di Tella and Mariano Sigman
The coexistence of cooperation and selfish instincts is a remarkable characteristic of humans. Psychological research has unveiled the cognitive mechanisms behind self-deception. Two important findings are that a higher ambiguity about others’ social preferences leads... View Details
- Article
Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based... View Details
- Article
Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection. But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing? We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Cooperative Solution of Stochastic Games
By: 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... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The NTU-Value of Stochastic Games
By: 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... View Details
- Article
Analyzing Scrip Systems
By: Kris Johnson, David Simchi-Levi and Peng Sun
Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in... View Details
- May 2014
- Article
I'm Sorry About the Rain! Superfluous Apologies Demonstrate Empathic Concern and Increase Trust
By: A.W. Brooks, H. Dai and M.E. Schweitzer
Existing apology research has conceptualized apologies as a device to rebuild relationships following a transgression. As a result, apology research has failed to investigate the use of apologies for outcomes for which individuals are obviously not culpable (e.g.,... View Details
- Article
Delayed-Response Strategies in Repeated Games with Observation Lags
By: Drew Fudenberg, Yuhta Ishii and Scott Duke Kominers
We extend the folk theorem of repeated games to two settings in which players' information about others' play arrives with stochastic lags. In our first model, signals are almost-perfect if and when they do arrive, that is, each player either observes an almost-perfect... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
How Short-Termism Invites Corruption—And What to Do About It
Researchers and business leaders have long decried short-termism: the excessive focus of executives of publicly traded companies-along with fund managers and other investors-on short-term results. The central concern is that short-termism discourages long-term... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Lawful but Corrupt: Gaming and the Problem of Institutional Corruption in the Private Sector
This paper describes how the gaming of society's rules by corporations contributes to the problem of institutional corruption in the world of business. "Gaming" in its various forms involves the use of technically legal means to subvert the intent of society's rules in... View Details
- September 2007
- Case
Nonverbal Communication: Distinguishing Truth and Lies
This video-based coursework illuminates the importance--and difficulty--of judging whether people are trustworthy. Students can test their skills at assessing whether contestants in a high-stakes game show will cooperate or defect. View Details
- January 2005 (Revised March 2007)
- Background Note
Game Theory and Business Strategy
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Dennis A. Yao
Provides a brief introduction to the application of game theory to business settings. Sets up and analyzes a minicase involving commitment. View Details