We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

We consider a model of conformity that permits a non-conformist equilibrium and multiple conformist equilibria. Agents are assumed to behave according to a best reply learning dynamic. We details the conditions under which a social norm and conformity emerge. The emergence of conformity depends...

We consider a simple model that combines elements of search and social learning. Acting in sequence, and observing the action adopted by a previous agent, agents must search for an action. We explore why agent heterogeneity may increase expected payoffs and demonstrate that social learning may...

Global games of regime change – coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it – have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend...

We apply the dynamic stochastic framework proposed by recent evolutionaryliterature to the class of strict supermodular games when two simplebehavior rules coexist in the population, imitation and myopic optimization.We assume that myopic optimizers are able to see how well their payoff...

We report the results of experiments designed to test the impact of social status on learning in a coordination game. In the experiment, all subjects observe the play of an agent who either has high status or low status. In one treatment the agent is another player in the game; in the other the...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to test the predictions of a dynamic global game designed to capture the self-fulfilling nature of speculative attacks. The game has two stages and a large number of heterogeneously informed agents deciding whether to attack the status quo. In the first...

We study a two-player game of strategic experimentation with private information in which agents choose the timing of risky investments. Agents learn about future returns through privately observed signals, others' investment decisions and from public experimentation outcomes when returns are...

We argue in favor of a departure from the standard equilibrium approach in game theory in favor of the less ambitious goal of describing only the actual behavior of rational players. We investigate the notion of rationality in behavioral models of extensive-form games (allowing for imperfect...

We consider learning in games that are misspecified in that players are unable to learn the true probability distribution over outcomes. Under misspecification, Bayes rule might not converge to the model that leads to actions with the highest objective payoff among the models subjectively...