We seek an evolutionary explanation for why in some situations humans maintain either optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of their environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain either optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and...

We analyze a symmetric n-firm Cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous population of optimizers and imitators. Imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round à la Vega-Redondo (1997). Optimizers play a myopic best response to the opponents' previous output....

Vega-Redondo (1997) showed that imitation leads to the Walrasian outcome in Cournot Oligopoly. We generalize his result to aggregative quasi-submodular games. Examples are the Cournot Oligopoly, Bertrand games with differentiated complementary products, Common- Pool Resource games, Rent-Seeking...

We present a formal model of symmetric n-firm Cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous population of profit optimizers and imitators. Imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la Vega-Redondo (1997). Optimizers play myopic best response to the...

A large theoretical literature on value capture following Brandenburger and Stuart (1996) uses cooperative games under complete information to study how and why firms earn supernormal profits. However, firms often have different information, beliefs, or creative foresight. We extend value...

A large theoretical literature on value capture following Brandenburger and Stuart Jr. (1996) uses cooperative games under complete information to study how and why firms earn supernormal profits. However, firms often have different information, beliefs, or creative foresight. We extend value...

We define a cautious version of extensive-form rationalizability for generalized extensive-form games with unawareness that we call prudent rationalizability. It is an extensive-form analogue of iterated admissibility. In each round of the procedure, for each tree and each information set of a...

Equilibrium notions for games with unawareness in the literature cannot be interpreted as steady-states of a learning process because players may discover novel actions during play. In this sense, many games with unawareness are ''self-destroying'' as a player's representation of the game may...