(with Dilip Mookherjee), American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 92, 253–259, 2002.
Summary. We explore the view, further developed in our other work, that inequality is an inevitable consequence of the market mechanism.
Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Part-Time Professor, University of Warwick
Research Fellow, CESifo
Spool Member, ThReD
Department of Economics,
New York University,
19 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.
debraj.ray@nyu.edu, +1 (212)-998-8906.
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Oxford University Press, 2008. This book is now open-access; feel free to download a copy, and to buy the print version if you like the book.
⟳ Re-randomize
A Non-Cooperative Theory of Coalitional Bargaining
(with Kalyan Chatterjee, Bhaskar Dutta and Kunal Sengupta), Review of Economic Studies 60, 463-477, 1993.
Summary. We explore a sequential-offers model of n-person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting. Our focus is on stationary equilibria of the resulting non-cooperative game. Efficient stationary equilibria converge to a point in the core as the discount factor approaches 1. For strictly convex games, this is the egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (Econometrica 1989).
Evolving Aspirations and Cooperation
(with Rajeeva Karandikar, Dilip Mookherjee, and Fernando Vega-Redondo), Journal of Economic Theory 80, 292-331, 1998.
Summary. A 2×2 game is played repeatedly by two satisficing players. The game considered includes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, as well as games of coordination and common interest. Each player has an aspiration at each date, and takes an action. The action is switched at the subsequent period only if the achieved payoff falls below aspirations; the switching probability depends on the shortfall. Aspirations are periodically updated according to payoff experience, but are occasionally subject to trembles. For sufficiently slow updating of aspirations and small tremble probability, it is shown that both players must ultimately cooperate most of the time.