Asymmetrischen Information und Lernen in Spielen

This dissertation consists of three self-contained research papers. Each focuses on a specific topic in game theory. Chapter 1 develops two models where two firms engaging in quantity competition have to decide on the timing of production. The innovation of these models is not only the introduction of imperfect information about market demand, but also the possibility of endogenously resolving this uncertainty by carrying out market research. I show that the well-established results in Hamilton and Slutsky (1990) and Sadanand and Sadanand (1996) represent two particular cases, corresponding to high and low costs of market research respectively. Furthermore, I demonstrate that endogenous leadership is the unique outcome when the cost of market research is intermediate, a situation, which to the author’s knowledge, is not found in any previous literature. In Chapter 2, We develop a general model of imitative learning with asymmetric memory, and investigate several applications within such a framework. We show that the demographic configuration of memory affects the long-run consequences of interactions among decision-makers in a nontrivial way. In the learning dynamics of Cournot oligopoly, we find that as long as there is at least one firm without memory, the unique stochastically stable state is the Walrasian equilibrium. We extend this result to aggregative games. In coordination games with a trade-off between efficiency and risk, we show a more complex picture. The selection of the long run equilibrium depends not only on the number of players with memory, but also on their nontrivial memory length. We provide cut-off values of the two parameters above, and show how they determine which equilibrium will be selected in the long run. Chapter 3 investigates the interaction between policies and social conventions. A model of “asymmetric rationality” is developed here, where the rational social planners set policies to control the coordination and migration of boundedly rational residents in two locations. If the social planners are only concerned with the efficiency of their respective locations, multiple Nash equilibria will exist in the game among social planners, leading to either globally-unified risk-dominant and yet inefficient conventions, or coexistence of conventions. If the scale of the locations is in any way important to the social planners, then it is likely that the social planners will completely forbid migration, leading to inefficient coordination in both locations