Paper #373

Title:

A general class of adaptative strategies

Authors:

Sergiu Hart and Andreu Mas-Colell

Date:

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.

Keywords:

Adaptive strategies, approachability, correlated equilibrium, fictitious play, regret

JEL codes:

C7, D7, C6

Area of Research:

Microeconomics

Published in:

Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 98(1), pages 26-54, May 2000
With the title:
A General Class of Adaptive Strategies

Download the paper in PDF format