A General Class of Adaptive Strategies

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Economics Working Paper No. 373 & Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Center for Rationality DP No. 192

34 Pages Posted: 10 Aug 1999

See all articles by Sergiu Hart

Sergiu Hart

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Center for the Study of Rationality

Andreu Mas-Colell

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Date Written: March 1999

Abstract

We exhibit and characterize an entire class of simple adaptive strategies, in the repeated play of a game, having the Hannan-consistency property: In the long-run, the player is guaranteed an average payoff as large as the best-reply payoff to the empirical distribution of play of the other players; i.e., there is no "regret." Smooth fictitious play (Fudenberg and Levine [1995]) and regret-matching (Hart and Mas-Colell [1998]) are particular cases. The motivation and application of this work come from the study of procedures whose empirical distribution of play is, in the long-run, (almost) a correlated equilibrium. The basic tool for the analysis is a generalization of Blackwell's [1956a] approachability strategy for games with vector payoffs.

JEL Classification: C7, D7, C6

Suggested Citation

Hart, Sergiu and Mas-Colell, Andreu, A General Class of Adaptive Strategies (March 1999). Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Economics Working Paper No. 373 & Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Center for Rationality DP No. 192, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=163274 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.163274

Sergiu Hart (Contact Author)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Center for the Study of Rationality ( email )

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Andreu Mas-Colell

Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( email )

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