This article analyses the ability of the learning firms in a Cournot oligopoly to discover market solutions more collusive that the Cournot equilibrium (CE). We start from the results of Vallée and Yıldızoğlu (J Econ Behav Organ 72:670–690, <CitationRef CitationID="CR11">2009</CitationRef>) and of Alós-Ferrer (Int J Ind Organ...</citationref>

This paper models the indirect evolution of the preferences of a population of fully rational agents repeatedly matched to play a symmetric 2 x 2 game in biological fitnesses. Each agent is biased in favor of one of the strategies, and receives a noisy signal of his and his opponent`s bias. With...

Convergence to Nash equilibrium in Cournot oligopoly is a problem that recurrently arises as a subject of study in economics. The development of evolutionary game theory has provided an equilibrium concept more directly connected with adjustment dynamics and the evolutionary stability of the...

Convergence to the Nash equilibrium in a Cournot oligopoly is a question that recurrently arises as a subject of controversy in economics. The development of evolutionary game theory has provided an equilibrium concept more directly connected with adjustment dynamics, and the evolutionary...

This article analyses the possibility of firms learning collusive solutions in a Cournot quantity game. Starting from the results of Vallée and Yildizoglu (2009) and of Alos-Ferrer (2004), we study the role of random experimenting, social learning (imitation), and (updated) memory in helping...

It is shown that the equilibrium notion of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) does have predictive power for standard models of Bertrand competition. This is in contrast to a recent claim by Qin and Stuart (1997). The claim is based on the observation that the solution concept ESS behaves...