Unbeatable imitation

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Paper ; No. 12-5

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Noncooperative Games ; Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games ; Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
• Subject: imitate-the-best ; learning ; symmetric games ; relative payoffs ; zero-sum games ; rock-paper-scissors ; finite population ESS ; generalized ordinal potential ; games ; quasiconcave games

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Duersch, Peter ; Oechssler, Joerg ; Schipper, Burkhard C.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of California, Department of Economics
• (where): Davis, CA
• (when): 2012

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/58366
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET