Weekly repo auctions are the European Central Bank's most important policy instrument. Provided that banks bid seriously, these auctions should determine the liquidity of the banking sector in an efficient and transparent way. However, under the fixed rate tender procedure used until June 2000,...

Weekly repo auctions are the European Central Bank's most important policy instrument. Provided that banks bid seriously, these auctions should reveal useful information about banks' liquidity needs and the stance of monetary policy. However 1 as we show in this paper, the applied auction rules...

Until June 2000 the European Central Bank (ECB) used fixed rate tenders for its weekly repo auctions. A switch to variable rate tenders became necessary due to massive overbidding by banks. In this paper we introduce a stylized game among banks to investigate this overbidding phenomenon. Our...

Recently there has been much theoretical and experimental work on learning in games. However, learning usually means "learning about the strategic behavior of opponents" rather than "learning about the game" as such. In contrast, here we report on an experiment designed to test whether players...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

Most real world situations which are susceptible to herding are also characterized by direct payoff externalities. Yet, the bulk of the theoretical and experimental literature focuses on pure informational externalities. In this paper we study several different forms of payoff externalities that...

In this note we study a very simple trial & error learning process in the context of a Cournot oligopoly. Without any knowledge of the payoff functions players increase, respectively decrease, their quantity by one unit as long as this leads to higher profits. We show that despite the absence of...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets (Avery and Zemsky, AER, 1998). More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As...

In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria based on Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous—time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier by Brown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently been suggested as a...