Once Beaten, Never Again: Imitation in Two-Player Potential Games

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 games, Cournot duopoly, price competition, public goods games, common pool resource games, and minimum effort coordination games.

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Year of publication:	2012-06-21
Authors:	Duersch, Peter ; Oechssler, Jörg ; Schipper, Burkhard C.
Institutions:	Alfred-Weber-Institut für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
Subject:	Imitate-the-best \| learning \| exact potential games \| symmetric games \| relative payoffs \| zero-sum games

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Extent:	text/html application/pdf
Series:	Working Papers.
Type of publication:	Book / Working Paper
Notes:	This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html Number 0529
Classification:	D43 - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection ; C73 - Stochastic and Dynamic Games ; C72 - Noncooperative Games
Source:	RePEc - Research Papers in Economics

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011266100