Imitation Processes with Small Mutations

Drew Fudenberg and Lorens Imhof

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: This note characterizes the impact of adding rare stochastic mutations to an “imitation dynamic,†meaning a process with the properties that absent strategies remain absent, and non-homogeneous states are transient. The resulting system will spend almost all of its time at the absorbing states of the no-mutation process. The work of Freidlin and Wentzell [Random Perturbations of Dynamical Systems, Springer, New York, 1984] and its extensions provide a general algorithm for calculating the limit distribution, but this algorithm can be complicated to apply. This note provides a simpler and more intuitive algorithm. Loosely speaking, in a process with K strategies, it is sufficient to find the invariant distribution of a K×K Markov matrix on the K homogeneous states, where the probability of a transit from “all play i†to “all play j†is the probability of a transition from the state “all agents but 1 play i, 1 plays j†to the state “all play j†.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Published in Journal of Economic Theory

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3190369/imitation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Imitation processes with small mutations (2006)
Working Paper: Imitation Processes with Small Mutations (2004)
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:hrv:faseco:3190369

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication (osc@harvard.edu).