Sixty-seven years of the Nash program: time for retirement?
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Sixty-seven years of the Nash program: time for retirement? Roberto Serrano1 Received: 8 June 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The Nash program is an important research agenda initiated in Nash (Econometrica 21:128–140, 1953) in order to bridge the gap between the noncooperative and cooperative counterparts of game theory. The program is thus turning sixty-seven years old, but I will argue it is not ready for retirement, as it is full of energy and one can still propose important directions to be explored. This paper completes and updates previous surveys, and suggests several directions for future research. Keywords Nash program · Bargaining · Implementation JEL Classification C71 · C72 · C78
1 Introduction The Nash program is an important research agenda initiated in Nash (1953). It is intended to bridge the gap between the noncooperative and cooperative counterparts of game theory. The program is thus turning sixty-seven years old, but I will argue it is not ready for retirement yet. Judging by the number of papers that it has produced recently, it is still full of energy. A rough count of papers in the Nash program, cited here and published or listed as working papers since my previous survey in 2005, is the following:
I thank Juan D. Moreno-Ternero and two anonymous referees for comments and encouragement. Geoffroy de Clippel and Rajiv Vohra gave helpful suggestions. I am indebted to Claus-Jochen Haake and Walter Trockel for encouraging me to write this paper. Claus-Jochen also gave me the idea for the title. Xu Zhang and Zeky Murra-Anton provided great research support with their literature review and reading of papers.
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Roberto Serrano [email protected] Department of Economics, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
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SERIEs Year
Number of papers
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
3 4 6 4 6 3 7 5 5 7 2 4 3 5 5
More importantly, exciting directions to be explored are waiting for good papers to be written. Many results can be found in the several decades of the program, and the reader is referred to Serrano (2005, 2008, 2014) for complementary surveys and commentaries. This paper completes and updates these previous pieces, and suggests several directions for future research. To avoid repetitions, and given that I see this paper as a new chapter in the saga of previous surveys I have written on the subject, I will spare the reader of the section on preliminaries that introduces mathematical notation. I refer the reader to those papers for it. Nonetheless, I have attempted to make the material contained here sufficiently informative and self-contained so that the reader can gain an appreciation of the recent progress made in the program. The plan of the paper is thus the following. Section 2 is devoted to interpretations and new directions for the Nash program, while Sect. 3 consists of a list of recent contributions to it. Section 4 contains a few suggestions for new research. As is always the case in surveys, the list
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