The concept of boundedly rational agents in evolutionary game theory has succeeded in producing clear results when traditional methodology was failing. However the majority of such papers have obtained their results when this bounded rationality itself vanishes. This paper considers whether such results are actually a good reflection of a population whose bounded rationality is small, but non-vanishing. We also look at a heterogenous population who play a co-ordination game but have conflicting interests, and investigate the stability of an equilibria where two strategies co-exist together. Firstly, I find that results using the standard vanishing noise approach can be very different from those obtained when noise is small but persistent. Secondly, when the results differ it is the non-vanishing noise approach which selects the co-existence equilibria. As recent economic and psychology studies highlight the irrationality of their human subjects, this paper seeks to further demonstrate that the literature needs to concentrate more on the analysis of truly noisy populations.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh in its series ESE Discussion Papers with number
169.
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.: