Biased-Belief Equilibrium

We investigate how distorted, yet structured, beliefs can persist in strategic situations. Specifically, we study two-player games in which each player is endowed with a biased-belief function that represents the discrepancy between a player’s beliefs about the opponent's strategy and the actual strategy. Our equilibrium condition requires that: (1) each player choose a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent's strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another, in the sense that if one of the players is endowed with a different distortion function, then that player is outperformed in the game induced by this new distortion function. We impose a mild monotonicity restriction on the feasible biased beliefs, and we obtain sharp predictions and novel insights into the set of stable outcomes and their supporting stable biases in various classes of games

Biased-Belief Equilibrium

We investigate how distorted, yet structured, beliefs can persist in strategic situations. Specifically, we study two-player games in which each player is endowed with a biased-belief function that represents the discrepancy between a player’s beliefs about the opponent's strategy and the actual strategy. Our equilibrium condition requires that: (1) each player choose a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent's strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another, in the sense that if one of the players is endowed with a different distortion function, then that player is outperformed in the game induced by this new distortion function. We impose a mild monotonicity restriction on the feasible biased beliefs, and we obtain sharp predictions and novel insights into the set of stable outcomes and their supporting stable biases in various classes of games

Rule Rationality

We study the strategic advantages of following rules of thumb that bundle different games together (called rule rationality) when this may be observed by one's opponent. We present a model in which the strategic environment determines which kind of rule rationality is adopted by the players. We apply the model to characterize the induced rules and outcomes in various interesting environments. Finally, we show the close relations between act rationality and “Stackelberg stability” (no player can earn from playing first)

Biased Belief Equilibrium

We investigate how distorted, yet structured, beliefs can persist in strategic situations. Specifically, we study two-player games in which each player is endowed with a biased-belief function that represents the discrepancy between a player’s beliefs about the opponent's strategy and the actual strategy. Our equilibrium condition requires that: (1) each player choose a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent's strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another. We obtain sharp predictions and novel insights into the set of stable outcomes and their supporting stable biases in various classes of games

Biased-Belief Equilibrium

We investigate how distorted, yet structured, beliefs can persist in strategic situations. Specifically, we study two-player games in which each player is endowed with a biased-belief function that represents the discrepancy between a player’s beliefs about the opponent's strategy and the actual strategy. Our equilibrium condition requires that: (1) each player choose a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent's strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another, in the sense that if one of the players is endowed with a different distortion function, then that player is outperformed in the game induced by this new distortion function. We impose a mild monotonicity restriction on the feasible biased beliefs, and we obtain sharp predictions and novel insights into the set of stable outcomes and their supporting stable biases in various classes of games

Rule Rationality

We study the strategic advantages of following rules of thumb that bundle different games together (called rule rationality) when this may be observed by one's opponent. We present a model in which the strategic environment determines which kind of rule rationality is adopted by the players. We apply the model to characterize the induced rules and outcomes in various interesting environments. Finally, we show the close relations between act rationality and “Stackelberg stability” (no player can earn from playing first)

Biased-Belief Equilibrium

We investigate how distorted, yet structured, beliefs can persist in strategic situations. Specifically, we study two-player games in which each player is endowed with a biased-belief function that represents the discrepancy between a player’s beliefs about the opponent's strategy and the actual strategy. Our equilibrium condition requires that: (1) each player choose a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent's strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another. We obtain sharp predictions and novel insights into the set of stable outcomes and their supporting stable biases in various classes of games

The Benefits of Coarse Preferences

We study the strategic advantages of coarsening one’s utility by clustering nearby payoffs together (i.e., classifying them the same way). Our solution concept, coarse-utility equilibrium (CUE) requires that (1) each player maximizes her coarse utility, given the opponent’s strategy, and (2) the classifications form best replies to one another. We characterize CUEs in various games. In particular, we show that there is a qualitative difference between CUEs in which only one of the players clusters payoffs, and those in which all players cluster their payoffs, and that the latter type induce players to treat co-players better than in Nash equilibria in the large class of games with monotone externalities