The paper investigates the minimum level of individual rationality that is needed for market prices to converge toward their equilibrium level. It does so by examining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the 'zero-intelligence' (ZI) agent trading approach, with which Gode and...

A vast literature shows that individuals frequently violate normative principles in reasoning. In evaluating the relevance of these findings for psychology, economics, and related disciplines, it is natural to ask whether reasoning errors reflect random aberrations or systematic biases. One...

A vast literature shows that individuals frequently fail to identify the normative solutions in logical reasoning tasks. Much attention has been devoted to the study of these deviations at the individual level; less eVort was exerted to investigate whether institutional settings might facilitate...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that "tacit collusion" becomes...

Researchers who have examined markets populated by "robot traders" have claimed that the high level of allocative efficiency observed in experimental markets is driven largely by the "intelligence" implicit in the rules of the market. Furthermore, they view the ability of agents (artificial or...

In this paper we report some experimental results on the effects that auctioning the right to play a public goods game with a provision point may have on equilibrium selection and efficiency. A control treatment reveals that, as in the experimental literature for similar environments, subjects'...