Unbeatable Imitation ∗ (2010)
BibTeX
@MISC{Duersch10unbeatableimitation,
author = {Peter Duersch and Jörg Oechssler and Jel-classifications C and We Thank Carlos Alós-ferrer and Chen Bo and Drew Fudenberg and Er Matros and John Stachurski},
title = {Unbeatable Imitation ∗},
year = {2010}
}
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Abstract
We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule “imitate-the-best ” can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of the rock-scissors-paper variety. Thus, in many interesting examples, like 2x2 games, Cournot duopoly, price competition, rent seeking, public goods games, common pool resource games, minimum effort coordination games, arms race, search, bargaining, etc., imitation cannot be beaten by much even by a very clever opponent. Keywords: Imitate-the-best, learning, symmetric games, relative payoffs, zerosum games, rock-paper-scissors, finite population ESS, potential games, quasisubmodular games, quasisupermodular games, quasiconcave games, aggregative games.
