This is a contribution to the growing experimental literature on how trial-and-error adjustment processes can establish a convention for coordination on an equilibrium in a game. A simple bargaining game introduced by Nash is used for this purpose. Subjects are conditioned in different...

Decision theory can be used to test the logic of decision making - one may ask whether a given set of decisions can be justified by a decision-theoretic model. Indeed, in principal-agent settings, such justifications may be required - a manager of an investment fund may be asked what beliefs she...

Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of "decision utilities'' that routinely overestimate the "experienced utility'' consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design...

We examine contemporaneous perfect equilibria, in which a player's actions after every history, evaluated at the point of deviation from the equilibrium, must be within of a best response. This concept implies, but is not implied by Radner's ex ante perfect equilibrium. A strategy profile is a...

We formulate a notion of stable outcomes in matching problems with one-sided asymmetric information. The key conceptual problem is to formulate a notion of a blocking pair that takes account of the inferences that the uninformed agent might make from the hypothesis that the current allocation is...

In his work on market signaling, Spence proposed a dynamic model of a signaling market in which a buyer revises prices in light of experience and sellers choose utility-maximizing signals given these prices. Spence also suggested that subjecting the dynamic process to rare perturbations might...

This paper develops an approach to equilibrium selection in game theory based on studying the equilibriating process through which equilibrium is achieved. The differential equations derived from models of interactive learning typically have stationary states that are not isolated. Instead, Nash...

We examine an Outside Option Game in which player I submits a claim for a share of a cake while player II simultaneously either makes a claim or chooses to opt out. If player II opts out, then she receives an opt-out payment while player I receives nothing. If player II opts in and if the claims...