nep-evo New Economics Papers
on Evolutionary Economics
Issue of 2010‒01‒30
four papers chosen by
Matthew Baker
City University of New York

  1. Global Analysis of an Expectations Augmented Evolutionary Dynamics By Massimiliano Landi
  2. Rational and Boundedly Rational Behavior in Sender-receiver Games By Massimiliano Landi; Domenico Colucci
  3. Characterising Equilibrium Selection in Global Games with Strategic Complementarities By Christian Basteck; Tijmen R. Daniëls; Frank Heinemann
  4. Well-Being, Preference Formation and the Danger of Paternalism By Mozaffar Qizilbash

  1. By: Massimiliano Landi (Singapore Management University)
    Abstract: We consider a deterministic evolutionary model where players form expectations about future play. Players are not fully rational and have expectations that change over time in response to current payoffs and feedback from the past. We provide a complete characterization of the qualitative dynamics so induced for a two strategies population game, and relate our findings to standard evolutionary dynamics and equilibrium selection when agents have rational forward looking expectations.
    Keywords: evolutionary games, dynamic systems, bounded rationality
    JEL: C73
    Date: 2010–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eab:develo:1550&r=evo
  2. By: Massimiliano Landi; Domenico Colucci (Singapore Management University)
    Abstract: We consider a signalling game in which a population of receivers decide on the outcome by majority rule, sender and receivers have conflicting interests, and there is uncertainty about both players’ types. We model players rationality along the lines of recent findings in behavioral game theory. We characterize the structure of the equilibria in the reduced game so obtained. We find that all pure strategy equilibria are consistent with successful attempts to mislead the receivers, and relate them to the message bin Laden sent on the eve of the 2004 US Presidential elections. The same result holds if we allow for some uncertainty about the sign of the correlation between the sender’s and the receivers’ payoffs.
    Keywords: bin Laden, sender receiver games, US Presidential elections, signalling game, payoffs
    JEL: C70 D72 D70
    Date: 2010–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eab:develo:1547&r=evo
  3. By: Christian Basteck; Tijmen R. Daniëls; Frank Heinemann
    Abstract: Global games are widely used for equilibrium selection to predict behaviour in complete information games with strategic complementarities. We establish two results on the global game selection. First, we show that it is independent of the payoff functions of the global game embedding, though it may depend on the noise distribution. Second, we give a simple sufficient criterion for noise independence in many action games. A many action game may be noise independent if it can be suitably decomposed into smaller (say, binary action) games, for which there are simple criteria guaranteeing noise independence. We delineate the games where noise independence may be established by counting the number of players or actions. In addition, we give an elementary proof that robustness to incomplete information implies noise independence.
    Keywords: global games, equilibrium selection, strategic complementarities
    JEL: C72 D82
    Date: 2010–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hum:wpaper:sfb649dp2010-008&r=evo
  4. By: Mozaffar Qizilbash
    Abstract: Informed or rational desire, capability and prudential value list views of well-being - must accommodate human limitations, as well as address issues about adaptation and paternalism. They sometimes address adaptation by toughening the requirement(s) on those desires, satisfaction of which constitutes well-being. That exacerbates a concern that these accounts if adopted will encourage policies which override actual desires and enforce paternalistic restrictions. Sunstein, like Sen, invokes democratic deliberation to address the adaptation problem, and advocates autonomy promoting paternalistic restrictions. Sunstein and Thaler's 'libertarian paternalism' extends this flavour of argument to cover examples of irrationality from behavioural economics. Their variation of the informed desire account involves highly idealized preferences which cannot, in practical terms, guide a paternalistic social planner, but lead to a potentially large range of cases where paternalistic intervention might, in principle, be justified. I argue that the liberal paternalist policy agenda should as currently conceived be resisted.
    Keywords: Length 31 pages
    Date: 2009–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esi:evopap:2009-18&r=evo

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