Behavioral economics provides several motivations for the common observation that agents appear somewhat unwilling to deviate from recent choices: salience, inertia, the formation of habits, the use of rules of thumb, or the locking in on certain modes of behavior due to learning by doing. This...

This paper provides two conditions of epistemic robustness, robustness to alternative best replies and robustness to non-best replies, and uses them to characterize variants of curb sets in finite games, including the set of rationalizable strategies.

A product set of pure strategies is a prep set ("prep" is short for "preparation") if it contains at least one best reply to any consistent belief that a player may have about the strategic behavior of his opponents. Minimal prep sets are shown to exists in a class of strategic games satisfying...

Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects playing games in the laboratory violate such solution concepts as Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection. This claim is premature. What has been rejected are certain joint hypotheses about preferences, knowledge, and behavior. This note...

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...

We find that contrary to common perception, cooperation as equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoner's dilemma is in many relevant cases not very plausible, or at least questionable: for a significant subset of the payoff-discount factor parameter space cooperation equilibria...

Why do money and markets crowd out cooperative relations? This paper characterizes the effects of intertemporal preferences, money, and markets on players' ability to cooperate in material-payoff supergames. Players' aversion to intertemporal substitution facilitates cooperation by decreasing...

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...

This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.

This paper examines the effects of search costs on prices in a Bertrand duopoly. It is shown that if the search cost is lowered, the expected price goes down in a single play of the stage game. However, if the game is repeated it may be easier to sustain collusion the lower the search cost. In...