EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Learning dynamics with social comparisons and limited memory

Juan I. Block (), Drew Fudenberg and David Levine
Additional contact information
Juan I. Block: Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Theoretical Economics, 2019, vol. 14, issue 1

Abstract: We study models of learning in games where agents with limited memory use social information to decide when and how to change their play. When agents only observe the aggregate distribution of payoffs and only recall information from the last period, aggregate play comes close to Nash equilibrium for generic games, and pure equilibria are generally more stable than mixed equilibria. When agents observe both the payoff distribution of other agents and the actions that led to those payoffs and can remember this for some time, the length of their memory plays a key role: With short memories, aggregate play may not come close to Nash equilibrium unless the game satisfies an acyclicity condition. When agents have sufficiently long memory generically aggregate play comes close to Nash equilibrium. However, unlike in the model where social information is solely about how well other agents are doing, mixed equilibria can be favored over pure ones.

Keywords: Social learning; Nash equilibrium; best response dynamics; equilibrium selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-01-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econtheory.org/ojs/index.php/te/article/viewFile/20190135/22775/674 (application/pdf)

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:the:publsh:2626

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Economics is currently edited by Simon Board, Todd D. Sarver, Juuso Toikka, Rakesh Vohra, Pierre-Olivier Weill

More articles in Theoretical Economics from Econometric Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin J. Osborne ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:the:publsh:2626