Selfconfirming Equilibrium and Uncertainty

Pierpaolo Battigalli (pierpaolo.battigalli@unibocconi.it), Simone Cerreia-Vioglio, Fabio Maccheroni and Massimo Marinacci

No 428, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University

Abstract: We propose to bring together two conceptually complementary ideas: (1) selfconfi?rming equilibrium (SCE): at a rest point of learning dynamics in a game played recurrently, agents best respond to confi?rmed beliefs, i.e. beliefs consistent with the evidence they accumulate, and (2) ambiguity aversion: agents, coeteris paribus, prefer to bet on events with known rather than unknown probabilities, more generally, agents distinguish objective from subjective uncertainty, which is captured by their ambiguity attitudes. Using as a workhorse the ?smooth ambiguity model of Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005), we provide a de?nition of "smooth SCE" which generalizes the traditional concept of Fudenberg and Levine (1993a,b), called Bayesian SCE, and admits Waldean (maxmin) SCE as a limit case. We show that the set of equilibria expands as ambiguity aversion increases. The intuition is simple: by playing the same "status-quo" strategy in a stable state an agent learns the implied objective probabilities of payoffs, but alternative strategies yield payoffs with unknown probabilities; keeping beliefs ?fixed, increased aversion to ambiguity makes such strategies less appealing. We rely on this core intuition to show that different notions of equilibrium are nested in a simple way, from ?ner to coarser: Nash, Bayesian SCE, Smooth SCE and Waldean SCE. We also prove some equivalence results, under special assumptions about the information structure.

Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-upt
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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