Learning from failure

Andreas Blume and April Franco

No 299, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through a symmetry constraint on agents? strategies. Among such attainable strategies, we solve for optimal and equilibrium strategies. We model the organization as a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed but unknown subset of action profiles are successes and all other action profiles are failures. The game is played until either there is a success or the time horizon is reached. For any time horizon, including infinity, we demonstrate existence of optimal attainable strategies and show that they are Nash equilibria. For some time horizons, we can solve explicitly for the optimal attainable strategies and show uniqueness. The solution connects the learning behavior of agents to the fundamentals that characterize the organization: Agents in the organization respond more slowly to failure as the future becomes more important, the size of the organization increases and the probability of success decreases.

Keywords: Game; theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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