In operant learning, behaviors are reinforced or inhibited in response to the consequences of similar actions taken in the past. However, because in natural environments the “same” situation never recurs, it is essential for the learner to decide what “similar” is so that he can...

Organisms modify their behavior in response to its consequences, a phenomenon referred to as operant learning. The computational principles and neural mechanisms underlying operant learning are a subject of extensive experimental and theoretical investigations. Theoretical approaches largely...

Correlation of players' actions may evolve in the common course of the play of a repeated game with perfect monitoring (``obline correlation''). In this paper we study the concealment of such correlation from a boundedly rational player. We show that ``strong'' players, i.e., players whose...

Many competitions require investment of nonrefundable resources, e.g., political campaigns, financial markets, sports or courting rituals. One contestant wins the prize for the invested amount, while all others forfeit their investments without receiving compensation. Frequently, contests are...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperation in a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Our approach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relies on endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of...

We investigate sufficient conditions for the existence of Bayesian-Nash equilibria that satisfy the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT). In the Bayesian game Gn among n jurors, we allow for arbitrary distribution on the types of jurors. In particular, any kind of dependency is possible. If each juror i...

In 1995, Aumann showed that in games of perfect information, common knowledge of rationality is consistent and entails the back- ward induction (BI) outcome. That work has been criticized because it uses "counterfactual" reasoning|what a player "would" do if he reached a node that he knows he...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

Stochastic dominance is a partial order on risky assets (gambles) that is based on the uniform preference, of all decision-makers (in an appropriate class), for one gamble over another. We modify this, first, by taking into account the status quo (given by the current wealth) and the possibility...