EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

On the existence of stable equilibria in monotone games

Anne-Christine Barthel and Eric Hoffmann

Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2023, vol. 105, issue C

Abstract: Although the local stability of some equilibrium can be seen as a weak requirement for a game to possess reasonable equilibrium predictions, conditions under which such equilibria generally exist remain an open question, as we give examples of monotone games in which no stable equilibrium exists. Our main result shows that in monotone games, very weak assumptions on the local strictness of best responses imply the existence of an equilibrium satisfying a rather strong form of local stability, in that all possible adaptive learning process beginning within a neighborhood of that equilibrium remain in that neighborhood and eventually converge back. In the special case of two-player games, no conditions on local strictness are required at all. Finally, we show how these results lead naturally to results on equilibrium selection, in the sense that in a game with two equilibria, exactly one is locally stable. Relying only on the monotonicity of best responses, we provide examples in which our methods apply, but standard differential methods do not.

Keywords: Strategic complements; Monotone games; Stability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304406823000101
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:mateco:v:105:y:2023:i:c:s0304406823000101

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2023.102817

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Mathematical Economics is currently edited by Atsushi (A.) Kajii

More articles in Journal of Mathematical Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:mateco:v:105:y:2023:i:c:s0304406823000101