The Evolution of Conventions

Abstract

The author shows how a group of individuals can learn to play a coordination game without any common knowledge and with only a small amount of rationality. The game is repeated many times by different players. Each player chooses an optimal reply based on incomplete information about what other players have done in the past. Occasionally they make mistakes. When the likelihood of mistakes is very small, typically one coordination equilibrium will be played almost all of the time over the long run. This stochastically stable equilibrium can be computed analytically using a general theorem the author proves on perturbed Markov processes.