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
Authors:	Duersch, Peter ; Oechssler, Jörg ; Schipper, Burkhard C.
Publisher:	Heidelberg : University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics
Subject:	Wiederholte Spiele \| Lernprozess \| Imitationsstrategie \| Gemeingüter \| Theorie \| Imitate-the-best \| learning \| exact potential games \| symmetric games \| relative payoffs \| zero-sum games

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Series:	Discussion Paper Series ; 529
Type of publication:	Book / Working Paper
Type of publication (narrower categories):	Working Paper
Language:	English
Other identifiers:	10.11588/heidok.00013440 [DOI] 720429668 [GVK] hdl:10419/127338 [Handle] RePEc:awi:wpaper:0529 [RePEc]
Classification:	D43 - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection ; C73 - Stochastic and Dynamic Games ; C72 - Noncooperative Games
Source:	EconStor

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011422230