Effort in Games with Homogenous Functions: Dr. Walter Ferrarese

Walter Ferrarese

The Department of Economics hosted Dr. Walter Ferrarese (University of Rome Tor Vergata) who presented his research titled “Equilibrium Effort in Games with Homogeneous Production Functions and Homogeneous Valuation”, on Wednesday, February 13, 2019.

Dr. Ferrarese’s theoretical paper analyzes symmetric n-player games in which players exert effort to win part or all of a prize. The value of the prize can either be exogenously given or is itself a function of the efforts of an arbitrary subset of contenders. A key assumption made is that of homogeneity of the functions mapping the vector of efforts into the part of the prize that each player receives in the game and on its value. Dr. Ferrarese presented a simple way to compute the equilibrium effort and the sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique interior symmetric pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.