We consider a basic stochastic evolutionary model with rare mutation and a best-reply (or better-reply) selection mechanism. Following Young's papers, we call a state stochastically stable if its long-term relative frequency of occurrence is bounded away from zero as the mutation rate decreases...

Sets closed under rational behavior were introduced by Basu and Weibull (1991) as subsets of the strategy space that contain all best replies to all strategy profiles in the set. We here consider a more restrictive notion of closure under rational behavior: a subset of the strategy space is...

It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a non-trivial two-player zero-sum game that...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

In (Viossat, 2006, "The replicator dynamics does not lead to correlated equilibria", forthcoming in Games and Economic Behavior), it was shown that the replicator dynamics may eliminate all pure strategies used in correlated equilibrium, so that only strategies that do not take part in any...

We here develop a model of pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by allowing players to have a lexicographic preference, second to the payoffs in the underlying game, for honesty. We formalize this by way of an honesty (or truth) correspondence between actions and...

Saez-Marti and Weibull [4] investigate the consequences of letting some agents play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply in Young's [8] bargaining model. This is how they introduce "cleverness" of players. We analyze such clever agents in general finite two-player games. We show that...

A large number of individuals are randomly matched into groups, where each group plays a finite symmetric game. Individuals breed true. The expected number of surviving offspring depends on own material payoff, but may also, due to cooperative breeding and/or reproductive competition, depend on...

In Young (1993, 1998) agents are recurrently matched to play a finite game and almost always play a myopic best reply to a frequency distribution based on a sample from the recent history of play. He proves that in a generic class of finite n-player games, as the mutation rate tends to zero,...

In this paper I define an evolutionary stability criterion for learning rules. Using Monte Carlo simulations, I then apply this criterion to a class of learning rules that can be represented by Camerer and Ho's (1999) model of learning. This class contains perturbed versions of reinforcement and...