We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider...

Economists tend to assume that agents maximize their expected utility. However, many different experiments have questioned expected utility maximization by showing that human behavior can be characterized as random. This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a theory of human behavior across very...

We analyze a two-player game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits. Each player has to decide in continuous time whether to use a safe arm with a known payoff or a risky arm whose likelihood of delivering payoffs is initially unknown. The quality of the risky arms is perfectly...

We study social learning in a large population of agents who only observe the actions taken by their neighbours. Agents have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses rationally, on the basis of private...