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...

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...

The folk theorems for infinitely repeated games with discounting presume that the discount rate between two successive periods is constant. Following the literature on quasi-exponential or hyperbolic discounting, I model the repeated interaction between two or more decision makers in a way that...

The importance of categorical reasoning in human cognition is well-established in psychology and cognitive science, and it is generally acknowledged that one of the most important functions of categorization is to facilitate prediction. This paper provides a model of optimal categorization. In...