A 2_2 game is played repeatedly by two satisficing players. The game considered includes the Prisoner's Dilemma, as well as games of coordination and common interest. Each player has an aspiration at each date, and takes an action. The action is switched at the subsequent period only if the achieved payoff falls below aspirations; the switching probability depends on the shortfall. Aspirations ...

Multiplicity of equilibria and the dependence on strong common knowledge assumptions are well-known problems in mechanism design. We address them by studying full implementation via transfer schemes, under general restrictions on agents’ beliefs. We show that incentive-compatible transfers ensure uniqueness—and hence full implementation—if they induce sufficiently weak strategic externalities. ...

The communication policy of the European Central Bank attracts a lot of attention from financial markets. This paper analyses the informational content of the monthly introductory statements of the ECB president explaining interest rate decisions with regard to inflation expectations of financial market experts for the euro area from February 1999 to June 2007. Estimations are conducted for the...

A number of senders with no ex ante private information publicly choose signals whose realizations they observe privately. Senders then convey verifiable messages about their signal realizations to a receiver who takes a non-contractible action that affects the welfare of all players. The space of available signals includes all conditional distributions of signal realizations and allows any sen...

Performance Appraisals and the Impact of Forced Distribution: An Experimental Investigation A real effort experiment is investigated in which supervisors have to rate the performance of individual workers who in turn receive a bonus payment based on these ratings. We compare a baseline treatment in which supervisors were not restricted in their rating behavior to a forced distribution system in...

Bayesian learning implies decreasing weights on prior beliefs and increasing weights on the accuracy of the analyst’s past forecast record, as the number of forecast errors comprising her forecast record (its length) increases. Consistent with this model of investor learning, empirical tests show that investors’ reactions to forecast news are increasing in the product of the accuracy and length...

This paper reports a laboratory experiment to study pricing and advertising behavior with costly buyer search. Sellers simultaneously post prices and may incur a cost to advertise this price. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, sellers either charge a high unadvertised price or randomize in an interval of lower advertised prices. Increases in search or advertising costs raise equilibrium price...

We examine stability under learning of sunspot equilibria in Real Business Cycle type models with indeterminacies. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of examining alternative representations of sunspot solutions. A general bivariate reduced form contains parameter regions in which sunspots are stable under learning. However, for parameters restricted to those generated by standard models of...

In this paper we experimentally test strategic information transmission between one informed and two uninformed agents in a cheap-talk game. We find evidence of the "disciplining" effect of public communication as compared to private; however, it is much weaker than predicted by the theory. Adding a second receiver naturally increases the complexity of strategic thinking when communication is p...

We prove that, in all finite generic extensive-form games of perfect information, a continuous-time best response dynamic always converges to a Nash equilibrium component. We show the robustness of convergence by an approximate best response dynamic: whatever the initial state and an allowed approximate best response dynamic, the state is close to the set of Nash equilibria most of the time. In...