The paper studies equilibrium selection in supermodular games based on a class of perfect foresight dynamics, introduced by Matsui and Matsuyama (JET 1995) and further developed by Hofbauer and Sorger (JET 1999, IGTR 2002) and Oyama (JET 2002). A normal form game is played repeatedly in a large society of rational agents. There are frictions: opportunities to revise actions follow independent Poisson processes. Each agent forms his belief about the future evolution of action distribution in the society to take an action that maximizes his expected discounted payoff. A perfect foresight path is defined to be a feasible path of action distribution to which every agent at revision opportunity takes a best response. A Nash equilibrium is said to be globally accessible if for each initial condition, there exists a perfect foresight path converging to this equilibrium; a Nash equilibrium is said to be absorbing if there exists no perfect foresight path escaping from a neighborhood of this equilibrium. By appealing to the monotonicity of the correspondence whose fixed points are perfect foresight paths, a unique Nash equilibrium that is absorbing and globally accessible for small frictions is identified for certain classes of supermodular games. Our equilibrium selection results are compared with those obtained via different approaches, such as the one that examines the robustness of equilibria to incomplete information (Kajii and Morris, Econometrica 1997)
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Find related papers by 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
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Akihiko Matsui & Kiminori Matsuyama, 1990.
"An Approach to Equilibrium Selection,"
Discussion Papers
970, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
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Akihiko Matsui & Kiminori Matsuyama, 1991.
"An Approach to Equilibrium Selection,"
Discussion Papers
1065, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
[Downloadable!]
Carlsson, Hans & van Damme, Eric, 1993.
"Global Games and Equilibrium Selection,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 989-1018, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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