In dynamic promotion contests, where performance measurement is noisy and ordinal, selection can be improved by biasing later stages in favor of early leaders. Even in the worst-case scenario, where noise swamps ability differences in determining relative performance, optimal bias is i) strictly...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

Decentralized matching markets on the internet allow large numbers of agents to interact anonymously at virtually no cost. Very little information is available to market participants and trade takes place at many different prices simultaneously. We propose a decentralized, completely uncoupled...

This article tries to connect two separate strands of literature concerning genetic algorithms. On the one hand, extensive research took place in mathematics and closely related sciences in order to find out more about the properties of genetic algorithms as stochastic processes. On the other...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the expectational stability of rational expectations equilibria and the possible convergence of adaptive learning processes. Results obtained using recursive least squares lead to the conjecture that a correspondence between these both selection...

This paper analyzes the effect of the availability of information about the payoff structure on the behavior of players in a Common-Pool Resource game. Six groups of six individuals played a complete information game, while other six groups played the same game but with no information about the...

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...

Two subjects have to repeatedly choose between two alternatives, A and B, where payoffs of an A or B-choice depend on the choices made by both players in a number of previous choices. Locally, alternative A gives always more payoff than alternative B. However, in terms of overall payoffs...