The paper presents the results of a novel experiment testing the effects of environment complexity on strategic behavior, using a centipede game. Behavior in the centipede game has been explained either by appealing to failures of backward induction or by calling for preferences that induce...

Second price allpay auctions (wars of attritions) have an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in pure strategies if valuations are private information. I show that for any level of uncertainty there exists a pure deviation strategy close to the equilibrium strategy such that for some valuations...

It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with finitely many firms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome (Vega-Redondo, 1997). However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in...

This paper applies the indirect evolutionary approach to study the evolution of inequality aversion in a simplified game of life. The game comprises a dilemma, a problem of coordination, and a problem of distribution as a general framework for the evolution of preferences. In singlegame...

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...

Assuming constant marginal cost, it is shown that a switch from specific to ad valorem taxation has no effect on the critical discount factor required to sustain collusion. This result is shown to hold for Cournot oligopoly as well as for Bertrand oligopoly when collusion is sustained with...

Using non-cooperative game theory the effects of mediation on the divorce rate and on the utility of the spouses are analysed. Two kinds of mediation are considered: restricted mediation that reduces the costs of divorce and extended mediation that additionally may prevent divorces by...

We consider a co-evolutionary model of social coordination and network formation where agents may decide on an action in a 2x2 - coordination game and on whom to establish costly links to. We find that a payoff dominant convention is selected for a wider parameter range when agents may only...

We introduce a framework to analyze the interaction of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents repeatedly playing a participation game with negative feedback. We assume that agents use different behavioral rules prescribing how to play the game conditionally on the outcome of previous rounds. We...