IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/63013.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Stable Observable Behavior

Author

Listed:
  • Heller, Yuval
  • Mohlin, Erik

Abstract

We study stable behavior when players are randomly matched to play a game, and before the game begins each player may observe how his partner behaved in a few interactions in the past. We present a novel modeling approach and we show that strict Nash equilibria are always stable in such environments. We apply the model to study the Prisoner's Dilemma. We show that if players only observe past actions, then defection is the unique stable outcome. However, if players are able to observe past action profiles, then cooperation is also stable. Finally, we present extensions that study endogenous observation probabilities and the evolution of preferences.

Suggested Citation

  • Heller, Yuval & Mohlin, Erik, 2015. "Stable Observable Behavior," MPRA Paper 63013, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:63013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/63013/1/MPRA_paper_63013.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/66176/1/MPRA_paper_66176.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70720/1/MPRA_paper_70720.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/76573/1/MPRA_paper_76573.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/79882/1/MPRA_paper_79882.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82740/1/MPRA_paper_82740.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Warneryd, Karl, 1991. "Evolutionary stability in unanimity games with cheap talk," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 375-378, August.
    2. Heller, Yuval, 2015. "Three steps ahead," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(1), January.
    3. Heller, Yuval & Mohlin, Erik, 2019. "Coevolution of deception and preferences: Darwin and Nash meet Machiavelli," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 223-247.
    4. Robson~ Arthur J., 1994. "An Informationally Robust Equilibrium for Two-Person Nonzero-Sum Games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 233-245, September.
    5. Selten, Reinhard, 1983. "Evolutionary stability in extensive two-person games," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 269-363, September.
    6. Heifetz, Aviad & Shannon, Chris & Spiegel, Yossi, 2007. "What to maximize if you must," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 31-57, March.
    7. Heller, Yuval, 2014. "Stability and trembles in extensive-form games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 132-136.
    8. Ok, Efe A. & Vega-Redondo, Fernando, 2001. "On the Evolution of Individualistic Preferences: An Incomplete Information Scenario," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 97(2), pages 231-254, April.
    9. Cressman, R., 1997. "Local stability of smooth selection dynamics for normal form games," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 1-19, August.
    10. Solan, Eilon & Yariv, Leeat, 2004. "Games with espionage," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 172-199, April.
    11. Glenn Ellison, 1994. "Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma with Anonymous Random Matching," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 61(3), pages 567-588.
    12. Takahashi, Satoru, 2010. "Community enforcement when players observe partners' past play," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(1), pages 42-62, January.
    13. Avinash Dixit, 2003. "On Modes of Economic Governance," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(2), pages 449-481, March.
    14. Sethi, Rajiv & Somanathan, E., 2001. "Preference Evolution and Reciprocity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 97(2), pages 273-297, April.
    15. M.A. Nowak & K. Sigmund, 1998. "Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity by Image Scoring/ The Dynamics of Indirect Reciprocity," Working Papers ir98040, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
    16. Okuno-Fujiwara Masahiro & Postlewaite Andrew, 1995. "Social Norms and Random Matching Games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 79-109, April.
    17. Eddie Dekel & Jeffrey C. Ely & Okan Yilankaya, 2007. "Evolution of Preferences -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 74(3), pages 685-704.
    18. Herold, Florian & Kuzmics, Christoph, 2009. "Evolutionary stability of discrimination under observability," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 542-551, November.
    19. Kim, Yong-Gwan & Sobel, Joel, 1995. "An Evolutionary Approach to Pre-play Communication," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1181-1193, September.
    20. Berger Ulrich & Ansgar Grüne, 2014. "Evolutionary Stability of Indirect Reciprocity by Image Scoring," Department of Economics Working Papers wuwp168, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Economics.
    21. Rosenthal, R W, 1979. "Sequences of Games with Varying Opponents," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(6), pages 1353-1366, November.
    22. Takako Fujiwara-Greve & Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, 2009. "Voluntarily Separable Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(3), pages 993-1021.
    23. K. Schlag, 2010. "Cheap Talk and Evolutionary Dynamics," Levine's Working Paper Archive 541, David K. Levine.
    24. , H., 2010. "Local stability under evolutionary game dynamics," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 5(1), January.
    25. Michihiro Kandori, 1992. "Social Norms and Community Enforcement," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(1), pages 63-80.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anton M Unakafov & Thomas Schultze & Alexander Gail & Sebastian Moeller & Igor Kagan & Stephan Eule & Fred Wolf, 2020. "Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(1), pages 1-32, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jonathan Newton, 2018. "Evolutionary Game Theory: A Renaissance," Games, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-67, May.
    2. Heller, Yuval & Mohlin, Erik, 2019. "Coevolution of deception and preferences: Darwin and Nash meet Machiavelli," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 223-247.
    3. Yuval Heller & Erik Mohlin, 2018. "Observations on Cooperation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(4), pages 2253-2282.
    4. Norman, Thomas W.L., 2012. "Equilibrium selection and the dynamic evolution of preferences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 311-320.
    5. Florian Gauer & Christoph Kuzmics, 2020. "Cognitive Empathy In Conflict Situations," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 61(4), pages 1659-1678, November.
    6. Herold, Florian & Kuzmics, Christoph, 2020. "The evolution of taking roles," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 38-63.
    7. Tóbiás, Áron, 2023. "Rational Altruism," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 207(C), pages 50-80.
    8. repec:grz:wpaper:2016-02 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Carrasco, José A. & Harrison, Rodrigo & Villena, Mauricio, 2018. "Interdependent preferences and endogenous reciprocity," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 68-75.
    10. Joyee Deb, 2008. "Cooperation and Community Responsibility: A Folk Theorem for Repeated Matching Games with Names," Working Papers 08-24, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    11. Takahashi, Satoru, 2010. "Community enforcement when players observe partners' past play," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(1), pages 42-62, January.
    12. Yuval Heller & Eyal Winter, 2016. "Rule Rationality," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 57(3), pages 997-1026, August.
    13. Jiabin Wu, 2020. "Labelling, homophily and preference evolution," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 49(1), pages 1-22, March.
    14. Tom Potoms & Tom Truyts, 2020. "Unhappy is the land without symbols - Group symbols in infinitely repeated public good games," Working Paper Series 1720, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    15. Carrasco, Jose A. & Harrison, Rodrigo & Villena, Mauricio G., 2022. "Strategic reciprocity and preference formation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 203(C), pages 368-381.
    16. Berger, Ulrich & Grüne, Ansgar, 2016. "On the stability of cooperation under indirect reciprocity with first-order information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 98(C), pages 19-33.
    17. Gaudeul, Alexia & Keser, Claudia & Müller, Stephan, 2021. "The evolution of morals under indirect reciprocity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 251-277.
    18. W. Bentley MacLeod, 2006. "Reputations, Relationships and the Enforcement of Incomplete Contracts," CESifo Working Paper Series 1730, CESifo.
    19. Sivan Frenkel & Yuval Heller & Roee Teper, 2018. "The Endowment Effect As Blessing," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 59(3), pages 1159-1186, August.
    20. Filip Vesely & Chun-Lei Yang, 2013. "On Optimal Social Convention in Voluntary Continuation Prisoner's Dilemma Games," CESifo Working Paper Series 4553, CESifo.
    21. Fujiwara-Greve, Takako & Okuno-Fujiwara, Masahiro & Suzuki, Nobue, 2012. "Voluntarily separable repeated Prisonerʼs Dilemma with reference letters," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 504-516.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Evolutionary stability; random matching; indirect reciprocity; secret handshake; submodularity; image scoring.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:63013. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.