Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

We study the impact of social learning on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Naive advice and observation of others' decisions as two forms of social learning trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. We find that subjects who receive advice outperform uninformed...

This paper analyzes an evolutionary version of the Public Good game in which boundedly rational agents can use imitation and best-reply decision rules. Several possibilities for both decision rules to be present in the population are considered. I show that altruistic behavior might survive if...

We discuss the emergence of cooperation in repeated Trust Mini-Games played by finite automata. Contrary to a previous result obtained by Piccione and Rubinstein (1993), we first prove that this repeated game admits two Nash equilibria, a cooperative and a non-cooperative one. Second, we show...

Aumann (1995) showed that for games with perfect information common knowledge of substantive rationality implies backward induction. Substantive rationality is defined in epistemic terms, that is, in terms of knowledge. We show that when substantive rationality is defined in doxastic terms, that...

We study the process of equilibrium selection in games when players have social preferences of the type discussed, among others, by Rabin (1993) and Segal and Sobel (2007). To this end, we employ a standard noisy version of the best response dynamics. We obtain several results concerning some...

We study the infinitely repeated prisonerʼs dilemma with the option to maintain or to quit relationships. We show that if agents imitate successful strategies infrequently, defection is not dynamically stable and cooperation emerges regardless of the initial distribution of strategies.

Trust is a central component of social and economic interactions among humans. While rational self-interest dictates that “investors” should not be trusting and “trustees” should not be trustworthy in one-shot anonymous interactions, behavioral experiments with the “trust game” have...