We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naive advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria based on Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous- time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier by Brown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently been suggested as a plausible...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of...

This paper studies network formation in settings where players are heterogeneous with respect to benefits as well as the costs of forming links. Our results demonstrate that centrality, center-sponsorship and short network diameter are robust features of equilibrium networks. We find that in a...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naïve advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria based on Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous—time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier by Brown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently been suggested as a...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches, especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed by including behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although this new development is most welcome, the...

Recent literature has questioned the existence of a learning foundation for the partially cursed equilibrium. This paper closes the gap by showing that a partially cursed equilibrium corresponds to a particular analogy-based expectation equilibrium.