Unbeatable Imitation

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

No 44, Working Papers from University of California, Davis, Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule ``imitate-if-better'' can hardly be beaten by any strategy. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable in the sense that there is no strategy that can exploit imitation as a money pump. In particular, imitation is subject to a money pump if and only if the relative payoff function of the game is of the rock-scissors-paper variety. We also show that a sufficient condition for imitation not being subject to a money pump is that the relative payoff game is a generalized ordinal potential game or a quasiconcave game. Our results apply to many interesting examples of symmetric games including 2 x 2 games, Cournot duopoly, price competition, public goods games, common pool resource games, and minimum effort coordination games.

Keywords: Imitate-the-best; learning; symmetric games; relative payoffs; zero-sum games; rock-paper-scissors; finite population ESS; generalized ordinal potential games; quasiconcave games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2012-04-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Unbeatable imitation (2012)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2011)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2010)
Working Paper: Unbeatable Imitation (2010)
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