This paper takes the idea of coalitional behavior – groups of people occasionally acting together to their mutual benefit – and incorporates it into the framework of evolutionary game theory that underpins the social learning literature. An equilibrium selection criterion is defined which we...

Sengupta and Sengupta (1996) study the accessibility of the core of a TU game and show that the core, if non-empty, can be reached from any non-core allocation via a finite sequence of successive blocks. This paper complements the result by showing that when the core is empty, a number of...

We study a setting in which imitative players are matched into pairs to play a Prisonerʼs Dilemma game. A well-known result in such setting is that under random matching cooperation vanishes for any interior initial condition. The novelty of this paper is that we consider partial rematching:...

The study of coalition formation under uncertainty poses subtle questions regarding the appropriate definition of the core. In this paper a new core concept, the interim sequential core (ISC), is proposed as a solution concept to transferable utility games with uncertainty when binding...

We experimentally assess the predictive power of two equilibrium selection principles for binary N-player entry games with strategic complementarities. In static entry games, we test the theory of global games which posits that players play games of complete information as if they were playing a...

This paper analyzes a two-player game of strategic experimentation with three-armed exponential bandits in continuous time. Players play bandits of identical types, with one arm that is safe in that it generates a known payoff, whereas the likelihood of the risky armsʼ yielding a positive...

In an individual experimentation problem a decision maker learns only from his own experience. It is well known that an optimal experimentation strategy for such problems sometimes results in the best alternative being dropped altogether, which is the so-called “Rothschild effect.” Many...

We study a communication game of common interest in which the sender observes one of infinite types and sends one of finite messages which is interpreted by the receiver. In equilibrium there is no full separation but types are clustered into contiguous cells. We give a full characterization of...

Many markets without repeated seller–buyer relations feature third-party “monitors” that sell recommendations. We analyze the profit-maximizing recommendation policies of such monitors. In an infinitely repeated game with seller moral hazard and short-lived consumers, a monopolistic...

We analyze dynamic price competition in a homogeneous goods duopoly, where consumers exchange information via word-of-mouth communication. A fraction of consumers, who do not learn any new information, remain locked-in at their previous supplier in each period. We analyze Markov perfect...