Cold play: Learning across bimatrix games

We study one-shot play in the set of all bimatrix games by a large population of agents. The agents never see the same game twice, but they can learn ‘across games’ by developing solution concepts that tell them how to play new games. Each agent’s individual solution concept is represented by a computer program, and natural selection is applied to derive stochastically stable solution concepts. Our aim is to develop a theory predicting how experienced agents would play in one-shot games

An evolutionary explanation of the value premium puzzle

As early as 1934 Graham and Dodd conjectured that excess returns from value investment originate from a tendency of stock prices to converge towards a fundamental value. This paper confirms their insights within the evolutionary finance model of Evstigneev et al. (Econ Theory 27:449-468, (Evstigneev et al. 2006)). Our empirical results show the predictive power of the evolutionary benchmark valuation for the relative market capitalization and its dynamics in the sample of firms listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index in 1981-200

Fragmentation and stability of markets

Trading skills are highly rewarded in practice but largely ignored in theoretical models of financial markets. This paper demonstrates the importance of skills by examining their interaction with market fragmentation and market stability. We consider a computational model where traders’ abilities to accurately price assets are endogenous. In contrast to models that do not consider skills, we find that centralising markets can lead to higher price volatility and less resilience to shocks because it increases the equilibrium proportion of unskilled traders

Stability and Collective Rationality.

A collective choice problem involves a set of agents and a set of feasi ble utility vectors. Many solutions to the collective choice problem (e.g., the Nash solution) are collectively rational, i.e., consistent with the maximization of some ordering of utility space. In this pap er, a stability condition due to J. C. Harsanyi is used to obtain the following integrability result: any solution satisfying Pareto optim ality, continuity, and bilateral stability can be represented by an a dditively separable Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function. Copyright 1987 by The Econometric Society.

Social capital formation : some theory and experimental evidence

We use a rule-based decision model to study social capital formation and economic performance, where the agents are sometimes motivated by norms and sometimes by pure self-interest. In this framework, the normative concepts of trust, cooperation and reciprocity have natural counterparts in terms of observable behavior, which allows us to disentangle the interaction between them and form hypotheses that can be tested on experimental data. We apply the model to data from experiments with a gift exchange game in Norway and the Netherlands, and find that observed differences in trust and cooperation between the two subject groups are accounted for by differences in reciprocity. This indicates that reciprocity may be a key to understanding social capital formation and its effect on economic performance