We consider a basic stochastic evolutionary model with rare mutation and a best-reply (or better-reply) selection mechanism. Following Young's papers, we call a state stochastically stable if its long-term relative frequency of occurrence is bounded away from zero as the mutation rate decreases...

Sets closed under rational behavior were introduced by Basu and Weibull (1991) as subsets of the strategy space that contain all best replies to all strategy profiles in the set. We here consider a more restrictive notion of closure under rational behavior: a subset of the strategy space is...

Saez-Marti and Weibull [4] investigate the consequences of letting some agents play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply in Young's [8] bargaining model. This is how they introduce "cleverness" of players. We analyze such clever agents in general finite two-player games. We show that...

In (Viossat, 2006, "The replicator dynamics does not lead to correlated equilibria", forthcoming in Games and Economic Behavior), it was shown that the replicator dynamics may eliminate all pure strategies used in correlated equilibrium, so that only strategies that do not take part in any...

A large number of individuals are randomly matched into groups, where each group plays a finite symmetric game. Individuals breed true. The expected number of surviving offspring depends on own material payoff, but may also, due to cooperative breeding and/or reproductive competition, depend on...

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...

The standard framework for analyzing games with incomplete information models players as if they form beliefs about their opponents' beliefs about their opponents' beliefs and so on, that is, as if players have an infinite depth of reasoning. This strong assumption has nontrivial implications,...

By identifying types whose low-order beliefs - up to level li - about the state of nature coincide, we obtain quotient type spaces that are typically smaller than the original ones, preserve basic topological properties, and allow standard equilibrium analysis even under bounded reasoning. Our...

A product set of pure strategies is a prep set ("prep" is short for "preparation") if it contains at least one best reply to any consistent belief that a player may have about the strategic behavior of his opponents. Minimal prep sets are shown to exists in a class of strategic games satisfying...

This paper provides two conditions of epistemic robustness, robustness to alternative best replies and robustness to non-best replies, and uses them to characterize variants of curb sets in finite games, including the set of rationalizable strategies. -- epistemic game theory ; epistemic...