Best experienced payoff dynamics and cooperation in the Centipede game

William Sandholm, Segismundo Izquierdo (segis@eis.uva.es) and Luis Izquierdo

Theoretical Economics, 2019, vol. 14, issue 4

Abstract: We study population game dynamics under which each revising agent tests each of his strategies a fixed number of times, with each play of each strategy being against a newly drawn opponent, and chooses the strategy whose total payoff was highest. In the Centipede game, these best experienced payoff dynamics lead to cooperative play. When strategies are tested once, play at the almost globally stable state is concentrated on the last few nodes of the game, with the proportions of agents playing each strategy being largely independent of the length of the game. Testing strategies many times leads to cyclical play.

Keywords: Evolutionary game theory; backward induction; Centipede game; computational algebra (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econtheory.org/ojs/index.php/te/article/viewFile/20191347/25675/735 (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:3565

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 (martin.osborne@utoronto.ca).