We report results of a series of experiments designed to test the stability of the best reply process. With linear demand and cost functions, the process is stable if and only if there are less than three firms in the market. However, we find no experimental evidence of such instability in a...

We provide a new explanation for the apparent underpricing of initial public offerings applicable to large, regulated firms like telecommunications companies. Under the assumption that regulation is subject to political pressure by voters we demonstrate that it may be rational for issuers to...

This paper investigates the impact of information about rivals' actions on the competitiveness of experimental oligopoly markets. We compare two treatments: in one, firms are informed about their rivals' actions and profits. In the other, firms are only given some aggregate information about...

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...

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 this process converges...

In this note we apply the notion of absent-mindedness (see Piccione and Rubinstein, 1994), which is a form of imperfect recall, to Rosenthal's (1981) centipede game. We show that for standard versions of the centipede game a subgame perfect equilibrium exists in which play is continued almost to...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets. More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As predicted by theory, we find that...

One of the more convincing interpretations of mixed strategy equilibria describes a mixed equilibrium as a steady state in a large population in which all players use pure strategies but the population as a whole mimics a mixed strategy. To be complete, however, this interpretation requires a...

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....

Experimental results on the ultimatum game show clearly that (1) large fractions of players offer a 'fair' allocation and (2) that unfair (but positive) offers are systematically rejected. We offer an explanation of this behavior using the 'indirect evolutionary approach' which is based on the...