This paper uses laboratory experiments to test the implications of the theory of repeated games on equilibrium payoffs and estimate strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma game with imperfect public monitoring. We find that subjects’ payoffs (i) decrease as noise increases, and (ii) are lower than the theoretical maximum for low noise, but exceed it for high noise. Under the ass...

Previous theoretical researches show that learning from good performers yields intense competition and results in the low profitability of firms. These researchers do not take into account differentiation strategies being referred as a useful strategic tool to mitigate competition. We introduce an evolutionary (learning) game into a duopoly model with product differentiation on the Hotelling li...

We argue that some but not all superstitions can persist when learning is rational and players are patient, and illustrate our argument with an example inspired by the code of Hammurabi. The code specified an “appeal by surviving in the river” as a way of deciding whether an accusation was true. According to our theory a mechanism that uses superstitions two or more steps off the equilibrium pa...

We study a winner-take-all R&D race between two firms that are privately informed about the arrival rate of an invention. Over time, each firm only observes whether the opponent left the race or not. The equilibrium displays a strong herding effect, that we call a ‘survivor’s curse.’ Unlike in the case of symmetric information, the two firms may quit the race (nearly) simultaneously even when t...

We imbed a classic fishery model, where the optimal policy follows a Most Rapid Approach Path to a steady state, into an overlapping generations setting. The current generation discounts future generations’ utility flows at a rate possibly different from the pure rate of time preference used to discount their own utility flows. The resulting model has non-constant discount rates, leading to tim...

This paper studies the dynamics by which populations with heterogeneous preferences for public good provision sort themselves into communities. I conduct laboratory experiments to consider which institutions best facilitate efficient self-organization when residents can move freely between locations. I find that institutions requiring all residents of a community to pay equal taxes enable subje...

This paper studies a complete-market version of the neoclassical growth model, where agents face idiosyncratic shocks to earnings. We show that if agents possess identical preferences of either the CRRA or the addilog type, then the heterogeneous-agent economy behaves as if there was a representative consumer who faces three kinds of shocks, to preferences, to technology and to labor. We calibr...

We consider a repeated moral hazard problem, where both the principal and the wealth-constrained agent are risk-neutral. In each of two periods, the principal can make an investment and the agent can exert unobservable effort, leading to success or failure. Incentives in the second period act as carrot and stick for the first period, so that effort is higher after a success than after a failure...

Consider a finite-state stochastic process governed by an unknown objective probability distribution. Observing the system, a forecaster assigns subjective probabilities to future states. The resulting subjective forecast merges to the objective distribution if, with time, the forecasted probabilities converge to the Ž . correct but unknown probabilities. The forecast is calibrated if observed ...

We extend Armstrong’s [2] result on exclusion in multi-dimensional screening models in two key ways, providing support for the view that this result is generic and applicable to many different markets. First, we relax the strong technical assumptions he imposed on preferences and consumer types. Second, we extend the result beyond the monopolistic market structure to generalized oligopoly setti...