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Learning from failure

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Author Info
Andreas Blume
April Franco

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Abstract

We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through a symmetry constraint on agents’ strategies. Among such attainable strategies, we solve for optimal and equilibrium strategies. We model the organization as a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed but unknown subset of action profiles are successes and all other action profiles are failures. The game is played until either there is a success or the time horizon is reached. For any time horizon, including infinity, we demonstrate existence of optimal attainable strategies and show that they are Nash equilibria. For some time horizons, we can solve explicitly for the optimal attainable strategies and show uniqueness. The solution connects the learning behavior of agents to the fundamentals that characterize the organization: Agents in the organization respond more slowly to failure as the future becomes more important, the size of the organization increases and the probability of success decreases.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in its series Staff Report with number 299.

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Date of creation: 2002
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:299

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Keywords: Game theory

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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.:
  1. Radner, Roy, 1986. "Repeated Partnership Games with Imperfect Monitoring and No Discounting," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 53(1), pages 43-57, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Blume, Andreas, et al, 1998. "Experimental Evidence on the Evolution of Meaning of Messages in Sender-Receiver Games," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(5), pages 1323-40, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Rubinstein, Ariel, 1996. "Why Are Certain Properties of Binary Relations Relatively More Common in Natural Language?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(2), pages 343-55, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Richard H. Day & E. Herbert Tinney, 1968. "How to Co-operate in Business without Really Trying: A Learning Model of Decentralized Decision Making," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 76, pages 583. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Milgrom, Paul & Roberts, John, 1990. "Rationalizability, Learning, and Equilibrium in Games with Strategic Complementarities," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(6), pages 1255-77, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Crawford, Vincent P & Haller, Hans, 1990. "Learning How to Cooperate: Optimal Play in Repeated Coordination Games," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(3), pages 571-95, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Patrick Bolton & Christopher Harris, 1999. "Strategic Experimentation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 67(2), pages 349-374, March.
  8. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Hirshleifer, David & Welch, Ivo, 1992. "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change in Informational Cascades," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(5), pages 992-1026, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Radner, Roy & Myerson, Roger & Maskin, Eric, 1986. "An Example of a Repeated Partnership Game with Discounting and with Uniformly Inefficient Equilibria," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 53(1), pages 59-69, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  10. Drew Fudenberg & David K. Levine & Eric Maskin, 1994. "The Folk Theorem with Imperfect Public Information," Levine's Working Paper Archive 394, UCLA Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  11. Bhaskar, V., 2000. "Egalitarianism and Efficiency in Repeated Symmetric Games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 247-262, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  12. Blume, Andreas & Gneezy, Uri, 2000. "An Experimental Investigation of Optimal Learning in Coordination Games," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 90(1), pages 161-172, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  13. Banerjee, Abhijit V, 1992. "A Simple Model of Herd Behavior," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 107(3), pages 797-817, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  14. Unknown, 1998. "Editorial," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 515-527, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  15. Milgrom, Paul & Roberts, John, 1990. "The Economics of Modern Manufacturing: Technology, Strategy, and Organization," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(3), pages 511-28, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  16. North, Douglass C, 1994. "Economic Performance through Time," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(3), pages 359-68, June.
  17. Prescott, Edward C & Visscher, Michael, 1980. "Organization Capital," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 88(3), pages 446-61, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  18. Unknown, 1998. "Editorial," Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 17(4-5), pages 329-329. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  19. Blume, Andreas, 2000. "Coordination and Learning with a Partial Language," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 1-36, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  20. Radner, Roy, 1993. "The Organization of Decentralized Information Processing," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 1109-46, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  21. Unknown, 1998. "Editorial," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 21(4), pages 347-351, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  22. A. Rubinstein, 1999. "Economics and Language," Princeton Economic Theory Papers 00s6, Economics Department, Princeton University.
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  23. Drew Fudenberg & David K. Levine, 1983. "Subgame-Perfect Equilibria of Finite- and Infinite-Horizon Games," Levine's Working Paper Archive 219, UCLA Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  24. Michael Keren & David Levhari, 1983. "The Internal Organization of the Firm and the Shape of Average Costs," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 14(2), pages 474-486, Autumn. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  25. Unknown, 1998. "Editorial," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 657-661, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  26. Ichiro Obara, 2000. "Private Strategy and Efficiency: Repeated Partnership Games Revisited," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 1449, Econometric Society. [Downloadable!]
Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, 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.)

  1. John Duffy & Andreas Blume & April Franco, 2007. "Decentralized Organizational Learning: An Experimental Investigation," Working Papers 310, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Economics, revised Jul 2008. [Downloadable!]
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