A model of "satisficing" behavior in the repeated Prisoners Dilemma is studied. Each player has an aspiration at each date, and takes an action. [S]he switches from the action played in the previous period only if the achieved payoff fell below the aspiration level (with a probability that...

This paper proposes an aspiration-based model for (anonymous) cooperation where a large population of agents are re-matched every period to playa Prisoner's Dilemma. At each point in time, agents hold a certain common aspiration level which is updated on the basis of population-average...

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...

The aim of this paper is to show the relation among equilibria in models with different levels of rationality. The different levels of rationality are defined in terms of the number of iterations that a player can perform with a simple rule for updating beliefs. It is shown that the rule...

Competition has long been regarded as productivity enhancing. Understanding the mechanism by which competition affects innovation and productivity is therefore an important topic for economic policy. The main contribution of this paper is to disentangle the relationship between competition and...

In this paper, present a calibrated model of life-cycle occupation and investment decisions where households choose between paid work and entrepreneurship and conditional on the latter how much of their savings to invest in their business. The returns to entrepreneurial activity are modeled...

In this paper, we show that downstream mergers increase the incentives of an up-stream firm to invest in cost-reducing R&D. The upstream firm revenues increase with industry profits, which in turn increase with concentration downstream and this explains the positive link between concentration...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of operators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more...

Equilibrium selection in the Nash demand game is investigated in a learning context with persistent randomness. I adopt a matching framework similar to Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and assume that individuals belong to populations of different sizes. Despite the myopic behavior of...

This paper analyses the evolution of competition in the Mexican banking system in the period 1993-2005, a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose we use two indicators of competition from the theory of industrial organization (the Lerner index and...