In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons in?uence agents? incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects,...

In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons influence agents' incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects,...

This article reports the results of a first-price sealed-bid auction experiment, which has been designed to test the Nash equilibrium predictions of individual bidding behavior. Subjects faced in 100 auctions always the same resale value and competed with computerized bids. Three treatments were...

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...

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 paper we introduce four new learning models: impulse balance learning, impulse matching learning, action-sampling learning, and payoff-sampling learning. With this models and together with the models of self- tuning EWA learning and reinforcement learning, we conduct simulations over 12...

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 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...