In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria based on Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous—time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier by Brown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently been suggested as a...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets (Avery and Zemsky, AER, 1998). More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As...

This paper investigates various theories explaining banks' overbidding in the fixed rate tenders of the European Central Bank (ECB). Using auction data from both the Bundesbank and the ECB, we show that none of the theories can on its own explain the observed overbidding. This implies that the...

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...

Most real world situations which are susceptible to herding are also characterized by direct payoff externalities. Yet, the bulk of the theoretical and experimental literature focuses on pure informational externalities. In this paper we study several different forms of payoff externalities that...

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...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

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...

Weekly repo auctions are the European Central Bank's most important policy instrument. Provided that banks bid seriously, these auctions should determine the liquidity of the banking sector in an efficient and transparent way. However, under the fixed rate tender procedure used until June 2000,...

We show in this paper that none of the existing static evolutionary stability concepts (ESS, CSS, uninvadability, NIS) is sufficient to guarantee dynamic stability in the weak topology with respect to standard evolutionary dynamics if the strategy space is continuous. We propose a new concept,...