Local Conventions
-
Jeffrey C Ely
Abstract
It is shown that player mobility has important consequences for the long-run equilibrium distribution in dynamic evolutionary models of strategy adjustment, when updating is prone to small probability perturbations, i.e. “mistakes" or “mutations." Ellison (1993) concluded that the effect on the matching process of localized “neighborhoods" was to strengthen the stability of risk-dominant outcomes, originally demonstrated by Kandori, Mailath, and Rob (1993) (KMR) and Young (1993). I consider a model in which players can choose the neighborhoods to which they belong. When strategies and locations are updated simultaneously, only efficient strategies survive. The robustness of this conclusion is emphasized in a general locational model in which strategy revision opportunities are allowed to arrive at a faster rate than opportunities to change locations. The efficient strategy persists in all cases in which the locational structure is non-trivial. Moreover, even as the relative frequency of player mobility approaches zero, the efficient strategy occurs with boundedly positive relative frequency. This result is in stark contrast to the conclusions of the previous models.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Local Conventions
- Equilibrium Departures from Common Knowledge in Games with Non-Additive Expected Utility
- Bargaining over Risky Assets
- Private Strategies in Finitely Repeated Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring
- Regulation by Negotiation: the Private Benefit Bias
- Joint Liability and Peer Monitoring under Group Lending
- The Noisy Duopolist
- Spontaneous Market Emergence
- A Simple Linear Programming Approach to Gain, Loss and Asset Pricing
- Forward Discount Bias, Nalebuff's Envelope Puzzle, and the Siegel Paradox in Foreign Exchange
- Risk Averse Supervisors and the Efficiency of Collusion
- Advances Article
- The Principal-Agent Matching Market
Articles in the same Issue
- Local Conventions
- Equilibrium Departures from Common Knowledge in Games with Non-Additive Expected Utility
- Bargaining over Risky Assets
- Private Strategies in Finitely Repeated Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring
- Regulation by Negotiation: the Private Benefit Bias
- Joint Liability and Peer Monitoring under Group Lending
- The Noisy Duopolist
- Spontaneous Market Emergence
- A Simple Linear Programming Approach to Gain, Loss and Asset Pricing
- Forward Discount Bias, Nalebuff's Envelope Puzzle, and the Siegel Paradox in Foreign Exchange
- Risk Averse Supervisors and the Efficiency of Collusion
- Advances Article
- The Principal-Agent Matching Market
