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Evolutionary Equilibrium with Forward-Looking Players

 
Paper:ewp-game/9509001
From:    (Larry Blume) 
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 95 13:30:12 EDT

Abstract:
The stochastic evolutionary game literature is built on three behavioral postulates: ``noisy'' decisionmaking, myopic decisionmaking and random opportunities for choice (inertia). The role of noise is by now well- understood. This paper investigates the significance of the other two postulates. The model is the conventional evolutionary story, where a population of players is randomly matched against each other, and where strategy revision opportunities for each player arrive at random moments. But here players are assumed to have rational expectations about the evolution of play of their opponents, and choose revision policies to maximize the expected present value of the payoff stream. The dynamic programming problem each player solves is studied, and equilibrium is shown to exist. Not surprisingly, myopic play emerges as discount rates become large. More surprising is that, for any discount rate, myopic play also emerges as the arrival rate of strategy revision opportunities shrinks to~0. These results hold for any $K\times K$ symmetric game. For $2\times 2$ coordination games the effects of taking limits in the opposite direction is studied. When the noise term is small, if players are sufficiently patient or if the arrival rate of strategy revision opportunities is sufficiently large, the unique symmetric Markov equilibrium has each player always choosing the payoff- dominant strategy.

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EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.

In 2005, Arts and Sciences commandeered the computing services that I had provided to the Department of Economics since 1987. Some might say that the department was sold out, others would (erroneously) claim that centralization is efficient, and still others would claim that I have few marketing skills.

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A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006