Best Responding to What? A Behavioral Approach to One Shot Play in 2x2 Games

We introduce a simple procedure to be used for selecting the strategies most likely to be played by inexperienced agents who interact in one shot 2x2 games. We start with an axiomatic description of a function that may capture players' beliefs. Various proposals connected with the concept of mixed strategy Nash equilibrium do not match this description. On the other hand minimax regret obeys all the axioms. Therefore we use minimax regret to approximate players' beliefs and we let players best respond to these conjectured beliefs. When compared with existing experimental evidences about one shot matching pennies games, this procedure correctly indicates the choices of the vast majority of the players. Applications to other classes of games are also explored

Education, Dynamic Signaling and Social Distance

The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable assumptions about the composition of the society, the model endogenously displays a growing average level of schooling. As education rises, signals get noisy and potentially harmful for what concerns firms' profitability. Firms, in order to adjust their screening process, react with an increase of their educational requirements. All these dynamics are in line with recent trends and other stylized facts about education

Strategic Announcements of Reference Points in Disputes and Litigations

This note shows how the frequent occurrence of seeing exceedingly high claims in disputes and litigations can be rationalized by a model in which claimants display reference dependent preferences, expect the judge to use a generalized social welfare function, and strategically announce their reference points.reference points, claims, litigations

Lowest Unique Bid Auctions with Signals

A lowest unique bid auction allocates a good to the agent who submits the lowest bid that is not matched by any other bid. This peculiar auction format is becoming increasingly popular over the Internet. We show that when all the bidders are rational such a selling mechanism can lead to positive profits only if there is a large mismatch between the auctioneer's and the bidders' valuation. On the contrary, the auction becomes highly lucrative if at least some bidders are myopic. In this second case, we analyze the key role played by the existence of some private signals that the seller sends to the bidders about the status of their bids. Data about actual auctions confirm the profitability of the mechanism and the limited rationality of the bidders.Lowest unique bid auctions; Signals; Bounded rationality.

Predicting one Shot Play in 2x2 Games Using Beliefs Based on Minimax Regret

We present a simple procedure that selects the strategies most likely to be played by inexperienced agents who interact in one shot 2x2 matching pennies games. As a first step we axiomatically describe players’ beliefs. We find the minimax regret criterion to be the simplest functional form that satisfies all the axioms. Then we hypothesize players act as if they were best responding to the belief their opponent plays accordino to minimax regret. When compared with existing experimental evidences about one shot matching pennies games, the procedure correctly indicates the choices of around 80% of the players. Applications to other classes of games are also explored.Predictions, Minimax regret, Beliefs, Matching pennies, Experiments

Education, Dynamic Signaling and Social Distance

The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable assumptions about the composition of the society, the model endogenously displays a growing average level of schooling. As education rises, signals get noisy and potentially harmful for what concerns firms' profitability. Firms, in order to adjust their screening process, react with an increase of their educational requirements. All these dynamics are in line with recent trends and other stylized facts about education.education; signaling; status seeking; conformist behaviour.

Some equivalence results between mixed strategy Nash equilibria and minimax regret in 2x2 games

We show that in any 2x2 game in which a unique mixed strategy Nash equilibrium exists, the probability distribution that this equilibrium assigns to player i is either the same or the mirror image of the distribution that the minimax regret criterion defines for player j. Sharper results that connect the two distributions for the same player are then established for the class of symmetric games.

Preempting versus Postponing: the Stealing Game

We present an endogenous timing game of action commitment in which players can steal from each other parts of a homogeneous and perfectly divisible pie (market). We show how the incentives to preempt or to follow the rivals radically change with the number of players involved in the game. In the course of the analysis we also introduce, discuss and apply the concept of pu-dominance, a generalization of the risk-dominance criterion to games with more than two players.Stealing, endogenous timing games, pu-dominance

Best Responding to What? A Behavioral Approach to One Shot Play in 2x2 Games

We introduce a simple procedure to be used for selecting the strategies most likely to be played by inexperienced agents who interact in one shot 2x2 games. We start with an axiomatic description of a function that may capture players' beliefs. Various proposals connected with the concept of mixed strategy Nash equilibrium do not match this description. On the other hand minimax regret obeys all the axioms. Therefore we use minimax regret to approximate players' beliefs and we let players best respond to these conjectured beliefs. When compared with existing experimental evidences about one shot matching pennies games, this procedure correctly indicates the choices of the vast majority of the players. Applications to other classes of games are also explored.prediction; beliefs; mixed strategy Nash equilibrium; minimax regret; matching pennies; experiments.