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Strategic Experimentation with Private Payoffs

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  • Heidhues, Paul
  • Rady, Sven
  • Strack, Philipp

Abstract

We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider problem is so severe that the equilibrium number of experiments is at most one plus the number of experiments that a single agent would perform. When payoffs are private information and players can communicate via cheap talk, the socially optimal symmetric experimentation profile can be supported as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium for sufficiently optimistic prior beliefs. These results generalize to more than two players whenever the success probability per period is not too high. In particular, this is the case when successes occur at the jump times of a Poisson process and the period length is sufficiently small.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich in its series Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems with number 387.

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Date of creation: 25 Sep 2012
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Handle: RePEc:trf:wpaper:387

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Related research

Keywords: Strategic Experimentation; Bayesian Learning; Cheap Talk; Two-Armed Bandit; Information Externality.;

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  1. Cripps, Martin & Keller, Godfrey & Rady, Sven, 2003. "Strategic Experimentation with Exponential Bandits," Discussion Papers in Economics 4, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
  2. Bergemann, Dirk & Hege, Ulrich, 1998. "Venture capital financing, moral hazard, and learning," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(6-8), pages 703-735, August.
  3. Dinah Rosenberg & Eilon Solan & Nicolas Vieille, 2004. "Social Learning in One-Arm Bandit Problems," Discussion Papers 1396, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
  4. Dirk Bergemann & Ulrich Hege, 2001. "The Financing of Innovation: Learning and Stopping," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1292, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
  5. Michihiro Kandori & Hitoshi Matsushima, 1997. "Private observation and Communication and Collusion," Levine's Working Paper Archive 1256, David K. Levine.
  6. Sven Rady & Godfrey Keller, 2007. "Strategic Experimentation with Poisson Bandits," 2007 Meeting Papers 332, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  7. Blume, Andreas & Heidhues, Paul, 2006. "Private monitoring in auctions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 131(1), pages 179-211, November.
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