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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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    Other versions:
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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!]
    Other versions:
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