Microtheory: Imitation dynamics and survival of irrational behaviour
Published: 16 March 2022
19 April. Professor Yannick Viossat, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL
Professor Yannick Viossat, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL
'Imitation dynamics and survival of irrational behaviour'
Tuesday 19 April 2022
Zoom, 1pm - 2.15pm
Register at business-events@glasgow.ac.uk
Abstract
In economics, agents are often assumed to be rational. One reason is that, at least in situations that occur often, economic agents are expected to gradually identify rewarding behaviours, and avoid choices that may be considered as irrational, such as playing a strictly dominated strategy. But is this intuition correct? The answer from the evolutionary game theory literature is that strictly dominated strategies are eliminated by game dynamics modeling pure imitation processes, but may survive under a wide range of dynamics allowing for innovation. As we will explain, this is because innovative dynamics favour rare strategies while standard imitative dynamics do not. However, as we also show, reasonable imitation protocols could favour rare or frequent strategies, allowing dominated strategies, i.e., irrational behaviours to persist. This may occur even when the level of domination is not small.
Biography
After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique (France), Yannick Viossat did a Ph.D in game theory with Sylvain Sorin and post-doc at the Stockholm School of Economics with Jörgen Weibull. He is now an Assistant Professor of mathematics at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. He is interested in evolutionary games and their applications in social sciences and in biology and medicine. He also studied properties of Nash equilibria and correlated equilibria.
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First published: 16 March 2022
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