Experimental evidence suggest that people only use 1-3 iterations of strategic reasoning, and that some people systematically use less iterations than others. In this paper, we present a novel evolutionary foundation for these stylized facts. In our model, agents interact in finitely repeated...

We present an evolutionary model of a population interacting in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Each type is characterized by the number of steps he looks ahead, and each agent has an independent probability to observe the opponent's type. We show that if this probability is not too close to 0 or...

Experimental evidence suggests that people tend to be overconfident in the sense that they overestimate the accuracy of their own predictions. In this paper we present a principal-agent model in which principal's interest in diversification motivates him to hire overconfident agents. We show...

We study the idea that seemingly unrelated behavioral biases can coevolve if they jointly compensate for the errors that any one of them would give rise to in isolation. We suggest that the “endowment effect” and the “winner's curse” could have jointly survived natural selection...

We study the idea that seemingly unrelated behavioral biases can coevolve if they jointly compensate for the errors that any one of them would give rise to in isolation. We suggest that the “endowment effect” and the “winner's curse” could have jointly survived natural selection...

We develop a framework in which individuals preferences co-evolve with their abilities to deceive others regarding their preferences and intentions. We show that a pure outcome is stable, essentially if and only if it is an efficient Nash equilibrium. All individuals have the same deception...

This paper develops a new theory of community enforcement that explains how cooperation can be sustained when agents change their partners over time. We study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a Prisoner's Dilemma, and each player observes a few of the partner's past...

In various environments new agents may base their decisions on observations of actions taken by a few other agents in the past. In this paper we analyze a broad class of such social learning processes, and study under what circumstances the initial behavior of the population has a lasting...

We examine evolutionary basis for risk aversion with respect to aggregate risk. We study populations in which agents face choices between aggregate risk and idiosyncratic risk. We show that the choices that maximize the long-run growth rate are induced by a heterogeneous population in which the...

A strong correlated equilibrium is a strategy profile that is immune to joint deviations. Different notions of strong correlated equilibria were defined in the literature. One major difference among those definitions is the stage in which coalitions can plan a joint deviation: before (ex-ante)...