The seminal work of Fudenberg and Tirole (1985) on how preemption erodes the value of an option to wait raises general questions about the relation between models in discrete and continuous time and thus about the interpretation of its central result, relying on an "infinitely fine grid". Here...

In this paper, we study how the pro-social impact due to the vigilance by other individuals is conditioned by both environmental and evolutionary effects. To this aim, we consider a known model where agents play a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG) among themselves and the pay-off matrix of an...

We characterize the class of symmetric two-player games in which tit-for-tat cannot be beaten even by very sophisticated opponents in a repeated game. It turns out to be the class of exact potential games. More generally, there is a class of simple imitation rules that includes tit-for-tat but...

Human players in our laboratory experiment received flow payoffs over 120 seconds each period from a standard Hawk-Dove bimatrix game played in continuous time. Play converged closely to the symmetric mixed Nash equilibrium under a one-population matching protocol. When the same players were...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule 'imitate-if-better' can hardly be beaten by any strategy. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable in the sense that there is no strategy that can exploit imitation as a...

In this paper, the authors continue the pursuit of the self-coordination mechanism as studied in the El Farol Bar problem. However, in addition to efficiency (the optimal use of the public facility), they are also interested in the distribution of the public resources among all agents. Hence,...

I study the properties of optimal long-term contracts in an environment in which the agent's type evolves stochastically over time. The model stylizes a buyer-seller relationship but the results apply quite naturally to many contractual situations including regulation and optimal...