We examine the impact of ambiguity on economic behaviour. We present a relatively non-technical account of ambiguity and show how it may be applied in economics. Optimistic and pessimistic responses to ambiguity are formally modelled. We show that pessimism has the effect of increasing...

We present a non-technical account of ambiguity in strategic games and show how it may be applied to economics and social sciences. Optimistic and pessimistic responses to ambiguity are formally modelled. We show that pessimism has the effect of increasing (decreasing) equilibrium prices under...

On a heterogeneous experimental oligopoly market, sellers choose a price, specify a set-valued prior-free conjecture about the others' behavior, and form their own profit-aspiration for each element of their conjecture. We formally define the concepts of satisficing and prior-free optimality and...

This paper demonstrates that the Bertrand paradox does not hold if cost functions are strictly convex. Instead, multiple equilibria exist which can be Pareto-ranked. The paper shows that the Pareto-dominant equilibrium may imply profus higher than in Cournot competition or may even sustain...

We present a formal model of symmetric n-firm Cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous population of profit optimizers and imitators. Imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la Vega-Redondo (1997). Optimizers play myopic best response to the...

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...

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modelled as individual decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior...

This paper reviews the Hotelling literature of product differentiation. The purpose of this work is to examine the impact of the market structure on price competitionand equilibrium differentiation. The existence of a general ’principle of differentiation’ is rejected. In contrast,...

This paper extends the standard Hotelling model with quadratic transport costs to the multi-firm case. Considering locational equilibria we show that neither holds the Principle of Maximum Differentiation - as in the duopoly model - nor does the Principle of Minimum Differentiation - as in the...

We show that in symmetric two-player exact potential games, the simple decision rule "imitate-if-better" cannot be beaten by any strategy in a repeated game by more than the maximal payoff difference of the one-period game. Our results apply to many interesting games including examples like 2x2...