 Learning Purified Mixed EquilibriaGlenn Ellison (gellison@mit.edu) and Drew Fudenberg Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers from Harvard - Institute of Economic Research Abstract: better understand when mixed equilibria might arise within populations of interact acting agents, we examine a model of smoothed fictitious play that is designed to capture Harsanyi's "Purification", view of mixed equilibria in a setting with a large population of agents. Our analysis concerns the local stability of equilibria when the degree of heterogeneity in the population is small. In 2 x 2 games our model is easy to analyze and yields the same conclusions as have previous models. Our primary focus is on 3 x 3 games where we provide a general characterization of which equilibria are locally stable, and discuss its implications in several particular cases. Among our conclusions are that learning can sometimes provide a justification for mixed equilibria outside of 2 x 2 games, that whether an equilibrium is stable or unstable is often dependent on the distribution of payoff heterogeneity in the population, that the totally mixed equilibria of zero sum games are generically stable, and that under a "balanced perturbation" condition the equilibria of symmetric games are generically unstable. Date: 1998 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fth:harver:1817 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers from Harvard - Institute of Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
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