 Invader strategies in the war of attrition with private informationLars Peter Metzger Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2014, vol. 50, issue C, 160-166 Abstract: Second price all-pay auctions (wars of attritions) have an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in pure strategies if valuations are private information. I show that for any level of uncertainty there exists a pure deviation strategy arbitrarily close to the equilibrium strategy such that for some valuations the equilibrium strategy has a selective disadvantage against the deviation if the population mainly plays the deviation strategy. I show that agents with those valuations would prefer to deviate even farther from the equilibrium strategy, if the population collectively uses the deviation strategy. I argue that in the Bayesian game studied here, a mass deviation can be caused by the entry of a small group of agents. The results provided in this paper imply that the equilibrium strategy is indeed unstable if one considers rare and independent mutations on the space of valuations. Numeric calculations indicate that the closer the deviation strategy to the equilibrium strategy, the more valuations are destabilizing. Keywords: Evolutionary stability; War of attrition; Strict equilibrium; Neighborhood invader strategy; Continuous stability; Evolutionary robustness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:mateco:v:50:y:2014:i:c:p:160-166 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2013.11.006 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 |
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