This paper models the indirect evolution of the preferences of a population of fully rational agents repeatedly matched to play a symmetric 2 x 2 game in biological fitnesses. Each agent is biased in favor of one of the strategies, and receives a noisy signal of his and his opponent`s bias. With...

Evolutionary game theory has largely focused on finite games. Dynamic stability is harder to attain in infinite strategy spaces; Bomze (Monatshefte fur Mathematik 110, 1990, 189-206) and Oechssler and Riedel (Economic Theory 17, 2001, 141-162) provide conditions for the stability of rest points...

Mertens and Parthasarathy (1987) proved the existence of sub-game perfect equilibria in discounted stochastic games.  Their method involved new techniques in dynamic programming, which were presented in a very general framework, with no expense spared in highlighting versatility and scope. ...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform.  There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in...

We examine some of the factors that might influence the quality of information produced in discussion groups on the internet, such as USENET and the WELL. In particular, we look at the impact of various different pricing structures, and compare regimes in which anonymity is enforced with regimes...

We exploit a unique opportunity to study how a large population of players in the field learn to play a novel game with a complicated and non-intuitive mixed strategy equilibrium.  We argue that standard models of belief-based learning and reinforcement learning are unable to explain the data,...

The diffusion of an innovation can be represented by a process in which agents choose perturbed best responses to what their neighbors are currently doing.  Diffusion is said to be fast if the expected waiting time until the innovation spreads widely is bounded above independently of the size...

A long-standing open question raised in the seminal paper of Kalai and Lehrer (1993) is whether or not the play of a repeated game, in the rational learning model introduced there, must eventually resemble play of exact equilibria, and not just play of approximate equilibria as demonstrated...

This paper studies the extent to which diffusion approximations provide a reliable guide to equilibrium selection results in finite games. It is shown that they do for a class of finite games with weak learning provided that limits are taken in a certain order. The paper also shows that making...

This paper demonstrates that inertia driven by switching costs leads to more rapid evolution in a class of games that includes m x m pure coordination games. Under the best-response dynamic and a fixed rate of mutation, the expected waiting time to reach long-run equilibrium is of lower order in...