Win Stay, Lose Shift as well as imitation strategies for iterated games rely on an aspiration level. With both learning rules a move is repeated unless the pay-off fell short of the aspiration level. I investigate social adaptation mechanisms for the aspiration level and their impact on the...

This paper investigates the properties of the most common form of reinforcement learning (the "basic model" of Erev and Roth, American Economic Review, 88, 848-881, 1998). Stochastic approximation theory has been used to analyse the local stability of fixed points under this learning process....

In this paper we build a spatial, aspiration-based model of learning in the context of Cournot oligopoly from which we want to explore the conditions that lead to the emergence of cooperation among firms. We consider an economy consisting of many identical duopolies; each duopoly is placed on a...

This paper investigates the properties of a local economy in which personal connections are important in finding jobs. The complementarities in the model generate an interesting nonlinear relationship between the distribution of human capital in the economy, the characteristics of the social...

In Part I we provide a heuristic discussion of the motivation for the investigation of games of status. Here we confine our remarks to several alternative formulations of games of status and to exploring the relationship between these games and the class of simple games, in part using the...

The paper generalizes the Kiyotaki-Wright trade model by treating the trading period as a finite game, so Nash's theorem can be used to prove the existence of equilibrium, and by treating the economy as a Markov process, so an ergodic theorem can be used to show the existence of equilibria with...

Many of the applications of game theory have been to economics where the individuals under study are assumed to be maximizing profits or Òutility'' or some other conventional economic goal of Òstatus.'' Loosely stated we think of status as one's position in a society compared with others,...