The theory of learning in games explores how, which, and what kind of equilibria might arise as a consequence of a long-run nonequilibrium process of learning, adaptation, and/or imitation. If agents’ strategies are completely observed at the end of each round (and agents are randomly matched...

The evolution of boundedly rational rules for playing normal form games is studied within stationary environments of stochastically changing games. Rules are viewed as algorithms prescribing strategies for the different normal form games that arise. It is shown that many of the folk results of...

A well known problem in economics is to describe properly a situation where N agents are repeatedly competing to use the same limited resource. A version of this problem is known in the literature as the El Farol game: week after week N agents face the decision whether to go or not to go to a...

We study impersonal exchange, and ask how agents can behave honestly in anonymous transactions without contracts. We analyze repeated anonymous random matching games, where agents observe only their own transactions. Little is known about cooperation in this setting beyond the prisoner's...

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 actions against previous opponents. We depart from the existing related literature by allowing a small fraction of the population to be commitment types....

Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that repeated communication is key for stable cooperation in environments where signals about others' actions are noisy. However, empirically the exact role of communication is not well understood. We study cooperation under different monitoring...

We report on an experiment examining behavior and equilibrium selection in two similar, infinitely repeated games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner's Dilemma under anonymous random matching. We are interested in the role that precedents may play for equilibrium selection between these two stage game...

We consider truthful implementation of the socially efficient allocation in an independent private-value environment in which agents receive private information over time. We propose a suitable generalization of the pivot mechanism, based on the marginal contribution of each agent. In the...

This paper studies the interaction of beliefs, payoff parameters, and the cooperation rate in the infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. We show formally that a player's belief about the probability of cooperation by their opponent moderates the effect of changes in the payoff parameters on...

Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that communication promotes cooperation under imperfect monitoring, where actions can only be observed with noise. We report the results of a laboratory experiment designed to answer the question how much communication is needed to sustain...