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...

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...

The study of evolutionary dynamics was so far mainly restricted to finite strategy spaces. In this paper we show that this restriction is in most cases unnecessary. We give a mild condition under which the continuous time replicator dynamics are well defined for infinite strategy spaces....

Weekly repo auctions are the European Central Bank's most important policy instrument. Provided that banks bid seriously, these auctions should reveal useful information about banks' liquidity needs and the stance of monetary policy. However 1 as we show in this paper, the applied auction rules...

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,...

In a recent paper Bagwell (1995) pointed out that only the Cournot outcome, but not the Stackelberg outcome, can be supported by a pure Nash equilibrium when actions of the Stackelberg leader are observed with the slightest error. The Stackelberg outcome, however, remains close to the outcome of...

Studying evolutionarily successful behavior we show in a general framework that when individuals maximizing payoff differentials invest resources in punishing others. Interestingly, these investments are increasing in individuals, own wealth and decreasing in the wealth of others.

The findings on the ultimatum game are considered as belonging to the most robust experimental results. In this paper we present a slightly altered version of the mini ultimatum game of Bolton and Zwick (1995). Whereas in the latter exactly equal splits were feasible in our games these were...

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the extended game with action commitment of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990). In their duopoly game, firms can choose their quantities in one of two periods before the market clears. If a firm commits to a quantity in period 1 it does not know whether the...

We report on an experiment designed to compare Stackelberg and Cournot duopoly markets with quantity competition. For each market we implement both a random matching and fixed-pairs version. Stackelberg markets yield, regardless of the matching scheme, higher outputs than Cournot markets. Under...