In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

Vega-Redondo (1997) showed that imitation leads to the Walrasian outcome in Cournot Oligopoly. We generalize his result to aggregative quasi-submodular games. Examples are the Cournot Oligopoly, Bertrand games with differentiated complementary products, Common- Pool Resource games, Rent-Seeking...

We present a formal model of symmetric n-firm Cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous population of profit optimizers and imitators. Imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la Vega-Redondo (1997). Optimizers play myopic best response to the...

In this paper, we consider the market for video games, where some firms are active in both, the market for video games hardware and software. It is puzzling that hardware can be easily made compatible with duplicated (i.e. pirated) software. We ask, whether there exist strategic reasons...

Mismatches typically arise because of information problems in markets. This paper discusses the possibility of mismatching in partnerships focussing on strategic mismatches that cannot be explained by information problems. It is shown that due to market competition sometimes players can profit...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

In this note we study a very simple trial & error learning process in the context of a Cournot oligopoly. Without any knowledge of the payoff functions players increase, respectively decrease, their quantity by one unit as long as this leads to higher profits. We show that despite the absence of...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject the models to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, not to different...

In this paper we investigate how the competitiveness of Cournot markets varies with the number of firms in an industry. We review previous Cournot experiments in the literature. Additionally, we conduct a new series of experiments studying oligopolies with two, three, four, and five firms in a...

The paper presents the concept of an "imitation equilibrium" and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a "reference structure" specifying a "reference group" for every player. The reference group is a set of other...