Unbeatable Imitation

Peter Duersch, Jörg Oechssler and Burkhard Schipper
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Peter Dürsch

No 499, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of the rock-scissors-paper variety. Thus, in many interesting examples, like 2x2 games, Cournot duopoly, price competition, rent seeking, public goods games, common pool resource games, minimum effort coordination games, arms race, search, bargaining, etc., imitation cannot be beaten by much even by a very clever opponent.

Keywords: Imitate-the-best; learning; symmetric games; relative payoffs; zero- sum games. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-gth
Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Unbeatable imitation (2012)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2012)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2011)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awi:wpaper:0499

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