Risk Dominance Selects the Leader: An Experimental Analysis

We perform an experimental analysis to test whether the risk dominance prediction is supported by the behavior of laboratory agents, in a 2X 2 coordination game whose equilibria are not Pareto ranked. This type of game arises very often in studies of industrial organization and international trade, and we extract the parameters for the experiment from a vertical product differentiation model with two asymmetric players choosing first qualities and then prices.We show that the higher the degree of asymmetry of the game, the higher the predictive power of the risk dominance criterion.Publicad

Evolution of Cooperative Networks and the Emergence of Leadership

A generic property of biological, social and economical networks is their ability to evolve in time, creating or supressing links. We model this situation with an adaptive network of agents playing a Prisoner's Dilemma game. Each agent plays with its local neighbors, collects an aggregate payoff and imitates the strategy of its best neighbor. Furthermore we allow the agents adapt their local neighborhood according to their satisfaction level and the strategy played. Therefore each agent will have diverse environments that induces an interesting dynamics in the cooperation fraction of the whole network. In the absence of noise, a steady state is always reached, where the strategies and the neighborhoods remain stationary, and where for a wide range of parameter values, an almost full cooperative outcome is obtained. The topology of the network in these states reveals that cooperators with a large number of connections emerges. These "leaders" are shown to be very important in understanding the global stability of the final steady state. If the "leaders" are perturbated, then global cascades arise and the system oscillates between the nearly full defection network and the fully cooperative outcome, before settling again in a nearly fully cooperative outcome.Cooperation -- Evolutionary Game Theory -- Stochastic Networks -- Prisoner Dilemma

A behavioral study of “noise” in coordination games

‘Noise’ in this study, in the sense of evolutionary game theory, refers to deviations from prevailing behavioral rules. Analyzing data from a laboratory experiment on coordination in networks, we tested ‘what kind of noise’ is supported by behavioral evidence. This empirical analysis complements a growing theoretical literature on ‘how noise matters’ for equilibrium selection. We find that the vast majority of decisions (96%96%) constitute myopic best responses, but deviations continue to occur with probabilities that are sensitive to their costs, that is, less frequent when implying larger payoff losses relative to the myopic best response. In addition, deviation rates vary with patterns of realized payoffs that are related to trial-and-error behavior. While there is little evidence that deviations are clustered in time or space, there is evidence of individual heterogeneity