arXiv subjects

Esmaiel Abounoori

Publications and source records attributed to Esmaiel Abounoori.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Changing the Game: Status-Quo Inertia, Institutional Design, and Equilibrium Transition

Many economic interventions are designed as marginal changes in incentives. Yet in environments shaped by coordination, institutional persistence, and path dependence, such reforms often leave behavior largely unchanged. This paper studies interventions in games when equilibrium selection displays status-quo inertia: if the pre-intervention equilibrium remains a Nash equilibrium after policy, it continues to be selected. In that environment, price-based interventions and simple option expansion may fail even when they improve welfare in a partial-equilibrium sense. By contrast, interventions that modify the feasible action space, especially deletion and replacement interventions, can be substantially more effective because they remove the strategic basis for persistence. We develop a simple framework, derive general results, provide complete proofs, and illustrate the economics with examples from climate transition, platform regulation, financial reform, and industrial modernization. The analysis highlights a basic policy lesson: when inefficient equilibria are institutionally entrenched, the central problem is often not how to price the existing game more finely, but how to change the game itself.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Breaking Status-Quo Inertia in Living Temporal Games: Dynamic Intervention, Implementation, and Structural Design

Westudy how a planner can design dynamic interventions to overcome status-quo inertia in living temporal games, where strategic agents control their state (active, sleep, partially dead) on a temporal network. Building on the continuous-time stochastic game framework of our companion paper, we introduce three intervention classes: bounded transfers (price based), structural modifications (edge deletion, addition, or replacement), and information signals. We formalize the notion of inertia depth and prove a threshold theorem: the status quo equilibrium survives all transfer perturbations whose magnitude is below a critical bound that depends on the remaining horizon. A central structural dominance result shows that for any finite transfer budget there exists a family of games where no bounded price intervention can eliminate the inefficient equilibrium, yet a single edge replacement (continuous-flow to discrete-transport) succeeds. We then study private-information subclasses with static types. Using a uniformization reduction, we prove an impossibility result: no direct mechanism can simultaneously satisfy ex post incentive compatibility, ex post budget balance, and history privacy while always implementing an efficient equilibrium. In the same subclass we construct a dynamic pivot mechanism that achieves second-best efficiency with bounded deficit. Finally, we show that replacing continuous-flow edges by discrete-transport edges weakly expands the set of implementable outcomes, highlighting the importance of temporal semantics for mechanism design. Our results extend the static analysis of [5] to continuous time strategic networks and provide a rigorous foundation for subsequent papers on learning and mean-field design.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Meta-Bayesian Nash Equilibrium: Existence via Kakutani's Fixed Point Theorem

We extend the concept of meta-Nash equilibrium, introduced by Eshaghi Gordji and Bagha [2026] for complete-information games, to environments with incomplete information. We define a meta-Bayesian Nash equilibrium as a profile of type-dependent mixed meta-strategies together with an environmental move such that no player type can profitably deviate and the environment cannot improve its expected payoff. For each transformed game, meta-payoffs are determined by the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium of that game. Using Kakutani's fixed point theorem, we establish existence under finiteness assumptions on type spaces, meta-actions, and transformations, together with the assumption that each transformed game admits a unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Several illustrative examples, including adaptive subsidy competition, cybersecurity protocol selection, and platform rule formation, demonstrate that private information at the meta-level plays an essential role in endogenous game transformation. The framework contains both classical Bayesian games and complete-information meta-games as special cases.

econ.TH↗