We report results of experiments designed to test the predictions of the best reply process. In a Cournot oligopoly with four firms, the best reply process should theoretically explode if demand and cost functions are linear. We find, however, no experimental evidence of such instability....

It is shown that a win-stay, lose-hift behavior rule with endogenous aspiration levels yields cooperation in a certain class of games. The aspiration level in each round equals the current population average. The class of games includes the prisoner's dilemma and Cournot oligopoly and thus...

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 learn...

Brander and Lewis argue in a seminal paper (AER, 1986) that a firm's debt-equity ratio should have important strategic effects on product market competition. We test their model in a duopoly experiment under both, Bertrand and Cournot competition. We find that leverage has strategic effects, but...

In this paper we investigate how the competitiveness of Cournot markets varies with the number of firms in an industry. We review previous Cournot experiments in the literature. Additionally, we conduct a new series of experiments studying oligopolies with two, three, four, and five firms in a...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject themodels to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the differentpredictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, notto different...