Sub-project 1 (“Evolution of Subjective Preferences”) has been recently published as a paper titled "Observations on Cooperation" in the Review of Economic Studies (joint with Erik Mohlin). The paper shows surprising sharp predictions, one of which, is that always defecting is the unique equilibrium in one half of Prisoner’s Dilemma (called, offensive), while full cooperation is a robust equilibrium supported by intuitive novel behavior in the other half of Prisoner’s Dilemma (called, defensive).
In addition, I recently initiated a related work in progress with Arthur Robson titled “evolution and preference for local risk”, which studies how evolutionary forces shape the preferences of people with respect to interdependence of risk with respect to other people in the population.
Sub-project 2 (“observing non-verifiable reports”) has yielded the working paper titled “Promises and Endogenous Reneging Costs” (joint with David Sturrock). The paper shows the influence of non-verifiable reports on planned effort in partnership games, where we allow agents to have endogenous (observable) costs to renege on their promised planned effort.
Sub-project 3 (“costly deception ability”) has resulted in the published paper “Coevolution of Deception and Preferences: Darwin and Nash Meet Machiavelli” in Games and Economic Behavior (joint with Erik Mohlin). The paper constructs a novel model showing how deception and preferences might co-evolve together.
Sub-project 4 (”multiple locally stable outcomes”) has yielded the recently published paper “Social Learning and the Shadow of the Past” in the Journal of economic Theory (joint with Erik Mohlin). The paper characterizes the necessary and sufficient conditions for the initial behavior of the population has a lasting effect on social learning processes.
Sub-project 5 (“asymmetric interactions between separate populations”) has yielded the work in progress (which will become a working paper in the next couple of months) “Renegotiation and Coordination with Private Values”, which applies the notion of renegotiation-proofness to one-shot symmetric and asymmetric games with pre-play cheap talk, and shows that it yields a sharp and novel prediction for (symmetric / asymmetric) coordination games with private values.
Sub-project 6 (“bounded rationality & cognitive costs”) has resulted in the recently publication “biased belief equilibrium” (joint with Eyal Winter) in the American Economic journal: Microeconomics, which presents a novel solution concept to capture a new kind of bounded rationality and cognitive inconsistencies. According to this solution concept (1) each player chooses a best-response strategy to his distorted belief about the opponent’s strategy, and (2) the distortion functions form best responses to one another.
The final sub-project 7 is an experiment that will test the theoretical predictions of the project (with a focus on sub-project 1). The experiment will be run joint with Matthew Embrey and Erik Mohlin, and will study the behavior of about 700 subjects in interactions in which each agent is matched with a new anonymous partner in each round, and can observe the behavior of the partner her last two rounds. The experiment has obtained all the necessary ethical approvals. The pilot is expected to run later in this spring, and the full experiment will run in Septmebr 2019.
