intergenerational class mobility in postwar japan this article uses mobility data from japan to 1 test the feather man jones hauser hypothesis that industrial societies share similar rats of intergenerational mobility and to 2 shed light on the debate about japanese exceptionalism japanese relative mibility rates show no systematically greater deviation from the postulated common pattern than do those of nine european nations regarding absolute mobility rates however an argument can be made for the distinctiveness of mobility patterns and processes of class formation and reproduction in japan

the stability of price dispersion under seller and consumer learning in many markets it is possible to find rival sellers charging different prices for the same good earlier research has attempted to explain this phenomenon by demonstrating the existence of dispersed price equilibria when consumers must make use of costly search to discover prices we ask whether such equilibria can be learned when sellers adjust prices adaptively in response to current market conditions with consumer behavior fixed convergence to a dispersed price equilibrium is possible in some cases however once consumer learning is introduced the monopoly outcome first found by diamond journal of economic theory3 1971 156 68 is the only stable equilibrium

evolving market structure an ace model of price dispersion and loyalty we present an agent based computational economics ace model of the wholesale sh market in marseille two of the stylized facts of that market are high loyalty of buyers to sellers and persistent price dispersion although it is every day the same population of sellers and buyers that meets in the same market hall in our ace model sellers decide on quantities to supply prices to ask and how to treat loyal customers while buyers decide which sellers to visit and which prices to accept learning takes place through reinforcement the model explains both stylized facts price dispersion and high loyalty in a coevolutionary process buyers learn to become loyal as sellers learn to o er higher utility to loyal buyers while these sellers in turn learn to o er higher utility to loyal buyers as they happen to realize higher gross revenues from loyal buyers the model also explains the e ect of heterogeneity of the buyers we analyze how this leads to subtle di erences in the shopping patterns of the di erent types of buyers and how this is

learning and risk aversion we study how learning shapes behavior towards risk when individuals are not assumed to know or to have beliefs about probability distributions in any period the behavior change induced by learning is assumed to depend on the action chosen and the payoff obtained we characterize learning processes that in expected value increase the probability of choosing the safest actions and provide sufficient conditions for them to converge to the choices of risk averse expected utility maximizers we provide a learning theoretic motivation for long run risk choices such as those in expected utility theory with known payoff distributions

comparative social mobility revisited models of convergence and divergence in 16 countries this paper reanalyzes 3 stratum intergenerational mobility classifications assembled by hazelrigg and garnier for men in 16 countries in the 1960s and 1970s log linear and log multiplicative models are used to compare mobility regimes and to estimate effects of industrialization educational enrollment social democracy and income inequality on immobility and other parameters of the mobility process several models of mobility fit the data equally well so criteria of plausibility and parsimony are applied to choose one model of stratum specific immobility and another model of vertical mobility with uniform immobility we find substantial similarity in mobility and immobility across countries but the exogenous variables do explain systematic differences among countries cross national variations are complex because most of the exogenous variables have different effects on different parameters of the mobility regime relative to other factors industrialization and education have weaker effects on mobility regimes than has usually been supposed

high and declining prices signal product quality high and declining prices signal a high quality product high prices are the efficient means of signaling because the consequent loss of sales volume is most damaging for lower cost lower quality products as time passes and the number of informed consumers increases the signaling distortion lessens resulting in a declining price profile the prediction of high and declining prices is robust across a variety of dynamic models and is consistent with recent empirical findings copyright 1991 by american economic association

market organisation and trading relationships in this paper we give a theoretical model of buyers behaviour on a market for a perishable good where no prices are posted we show that if buyers learn from their own previous experience there is a sharp division between those who learn to be loyal to certain sellers and those who continue to shop around this feature remains in more general models which are simulated and is consistent with empirical data from the marseille fish market

multi period competition with switching costs an overlapping generations formulation i examine an infinite period duoply market with positive consumer switching costs and overlapping generations of consumers when consumers have a finite time horizon then unlike beggs and klemperer 1992 the two firms may alternate dominance from one period to the next alternately charging high and low prices this agrees with the intuition that firms with a high locked in market share may set price so as to exploit that market share which causes a subsequent low market share among the new cohort of buyers leading to lower prices etc jel codes l13 d21 d43 d92

dynamic pricing of new experience goods we develop a dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations we show that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy in a mass market prices are declining over time in a niche market the optimal prices are initially low followed by higher prices that extract surplus from the buyers with a high willingness to pay we consider extensions of the model to integrate elements of social rather than private learning and turnover among buyers

a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation abstract we consider a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation we prove that the model may converge to either a steady state replicating the optimum of the static problem or a steady state driven by capital accumulation alone in the latter case the same steady state equilibrium is observed under both cournot and bertrand competition as well as social planning journal of economic literature classifications numbers c73 l13

advertising and coordination when market information such as price is difficult to communicate consumers and firms may be unable to take advantage of mutually beneficial scale economies so that coordination failures arise ostensibly uninformative advertising expenditures can be used to eliminate coordination failures by allowing an efficient firm to communicate implicitly that it offers a low price this provides a theoretical explanation for benham s 1972 empirical association of the ability to advertise with lower prices and larger scale advertising becomes necessary for optimal coordination when the identity of the efficient firm is uncertain an application to loss leader pricing is developed

payoff assessments without probabilities a simple dynamic model of choice abstract we develop a model which reflects the tendency of people to simplify the decision problems they face the decision maker chooses among alternate strategies only on the basis of the payoff she assesses she would obtain from them and these assessments do not explicitly take into account her subjective judgements regarding the likelihood of alternate states of the world at each stage the decision maker chooses the strategy that she assesses to give the highest payoff she updates her assessments adaptively we show that such behavior leads to maxmin choices we also consider the decision maker who experiences shocks journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 d8

word of mouth communication and social learning this paper studies the way that word of mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents we find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices with less communication making this conformity more likely despite the players naive decision rules and the stochastic decision environment word of mouth communication may lead all players to adopt the action that is on average superior these socially efficient outcomes tend to occur when each agent samples only a few others i introduction economic agents must often make decisions without knowing the costs and benefits of the possible choices given the frequency with which such situations arise it is understandable that agents often choose not to perform studies or experiments but instead rely on whatever information they have obtained via casual word of mouth communication reliance on this sort of easily obtained information appears to be common in circumstances ranging from consumers choosing restaurants or auto mechanics to business managers evaluating alternative organizational structures this paper studies two related environments in arguing that individuals reliance on word of mouth communication has interesting implications for their aggregate behavior first motivated by the diffusion of new technologies we consider a choice between two competing products with unequal qualities or payoffs and show that the structure of communication is important in determining whether the population as a whole is likely to learn to use the superior product second we consider a choice between two products or practices that are equally good and ask whether consumers are likely to herd onto a single choice or whether diversity will obtain even in the long run we explore the implications of word of mouth communication in a simple nonstrategic environment there is a large population of identical players each of whom repeatedly chooses between two possible actions each player s payoff is determined by his own

revisiting dynamic duopoly with consumer switching costs abstract the degree of collusiveness of a market with consumer switching costs is analyzed in an infinite horizon model of duopolistic competition in contrast with previous analyses we assume that firms compete for the demand for a homogeneous good by setting prices simultaneously in each period this problem is formulated as a simple stochastic game and a symmetric stationary markovian perfect equilibrium with distinctive economic features is studied we show that switching costs unambiguously relax price competition in equilibrium but that on the contrary they may make tacit collusion more difficult to sustain journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d43 l13

experimentation and competition abstract this paper examines the effect of competition on firms efforts to experiment and learn about market demand consumers are assumed to know prices only at sellers they have actually visited but must bear search costs to find the prices of other sellers under these conditions we show that firms incentives to experiment are diluted by comparison with the monopoly case and that this effect is stronger the smaller the search cost the learning environment we portray gives rise to several time paths which have been empirically documented including penetration pricing cream skimming and cyclical pricing journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d43 d83

pricing strategies in a dynamic duopoly a differential game model we formulate a differential game model for dynamic pricing in a duopolistic market firms demand functions are derived from utility maximizing behavior of consumers with the demand for a brand given by the logit model preferences for brands are assumed to evolve over time in the market in a manner akin to learning models postulated in the marketing literature we derive the differential equations governing the equilibrium open loop price paths over time and show that in steady state the brand with the higher preference level charges the higher price the formulation is extended to include the effects of consumer heterogeneity and equilibrium steady state prices are compared with those obtained when heterogeneity is ignored a comparison of steady state dynamic prices with myopic prices is provided an empirical example is discussed to show how steady state model predictions may be obtained from actual longitudinal purchase data

co evolution of firms and consumers and the implications for market dominance consider a setting in which rms randomly discover new ideas that a ect their products or services and implement favorable ones at the same time that rms are adapting their o erings consumers are searching among rms for the best match it is shown that implicit in these dual dynamics is an increasing returns mechanism which can result in one rm dominating the market in the long run the conditions under which there is sustained market dominance are characterized

adaptive learning models of consumer behavior abstract in a model of dynamic duopoly optimal price policies are characterized assuming consumers learn adaptively about the relative quality of the two products a contrast is made between belief based and reinforcement learning under reinforcement learning consumers can become locked into the habit of purchasing inferior goods such lock in permits the existence of multiple history dependent asymmetric steady states in which one firm dominates in contrast belief based learning rules must lead asymptotically to correct beliefs about the relative quality of the two brands and so in this case there is a unique steady state

learning and strategic pricing we consider the situation where a single consumer buys a stream of goods from different sellers over time the true value of each seller s product to the buyer is initially unknown additional information can be gained only by experimentation for exogeneously given prices the buyer s problem is a multi armed bandit problem the innovation in this paper is to endogenize the cost of experimentation to the consumer by allowing for price competition between the sellers the role of prices is then to allocate intertemporally the costs and benefits of learning between buyers and sellers we examine how strategic aspects of the oligopoly model interact with the learning process all markov perfect equilibria mpe are efficient we identify an equilibrium which besides its unique robustness properties has a strikingly simple seemingly myopic pricing rule prices below marginal cost emerge naturally to sustain experimentation intertemporal exchange of the gains of learning is necessary to support efficient experimentation we analyze the asymptotic behavior of the equilibria

naive reinforcement learning with endogenous aspirations this article considers a simple model of reinforcement learning all behavior change derives from the reinforcing or deterring effect of instantaneous payoff experiences payoff experiences are reinforcing or deterring depending on whether the payoff exceeds an aspiration level or falls short of it over time the aspiration level is adjusted toward the actually experienced payoffs this article shows that aspiration level adjustments may improve the decision maker s long run performance by preventing him or her from feeling dissatisfied with even the best available strategies however such movements also lead to persistent deviations from expected payoff maximization by creating probability matching effects

concentration indices and zipf s law abstract the relationships between zipf s law a relevant model for the firms size and the financial investment amounts and the major concentration indices are derived the hirschman herfindahl index is the most sensitive index in contexts where zipf s law applies

on the evolution of market institutions the platform design paradox we study competition among market designers who create new trading platforms when boundedly rational traders learn to select among them we ask whether walrasian platforms leading to market clearing trading outcomes will dominate the market in the long run if several market designers compete we find that traders learn to select non market clearing platforms with prices systematically above the market clearing level provided at least one such platform is introduced by a market designer this in turn leads market designers to introduce non market clearing platforms hence platform competition induces non competitive market outcomes

learning and communication in sender receiver games an econometric investigation this paper compares the performance of stimulus response sr and belief based learning bbl using data from game theory experiments the environment extensive form games played in a population setting is novel in the empirical literature on learning in games both the sr and bbl models fit the data reasonably well in common interest games with history while the test results accept sr and reject bbl in games with no history and in all but one of the divergent interest games estimation is challenging since the likelihood function is not globally concave and the results may be subject to convergence bias

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

adaptive learning vs equilibrium refinements in an entry limit pricing game signalling models are studied using experiments and adaptive learning models in an entry limit pricing game even though high cost monopolists never play dominated strategies the easier it is for other players to recognise that these strategies are dominated the more likely play is to converge to the undominated separating equilibrium and the more rapidly limit pricing develops this is inconsistent with the equilibrium refinements literature including cho kreps intuitive criterion and pure bayesian adaptive learning models an augmented adaptive learning model in which some players recognise the existence of dominated strategies and their consequences predicts these outcomes

unequal but fluid social mobility in chile in comparative perspective a major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes with one exception higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility evidence for the mobility inequality link is however inconclusive largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality this article introduces chile to the comparative project as the 10th most unequal country in the world chile is an adjudicative case if high inequality results in lower mobility chile should be significantly more rigid than its industrialized peers this hypothesis is disproved by the analysis despite vast economic inequality chile is as fluid if not more so than the much more equal industrialized nations furthermore there is no evidence of a decline in mobility as the result of the increase in inequality during the market oriented transformation of the country

aggregation and imperfect competition on the existence of equilibrium we present a new approach to the theory of imperfect competition and apply it to study price competition among differentiated products the central result provides general conditions under which there exists a pure strategy price equilibrium for any number of firms producing any set of products this includes products with multi dimen sional attributes in addition to the proof of existence we provide conditions for uniqueness our analysis covers location models the characteristics approach and probabilistic choice together in a unified framework to prove existence we employ aggregation theorems due to prekopa 1971 and borell 1975 our companion paper caplin and nalebuff 1991 introduces these theorems and develops the application to super majority voting rules we present a new approach to the theory of imperfect competition and apply it to study price competition among differentiated products the central result is that there exists a pure strategy price equilibrium for any number of firms producing any set of products in addition to the proof of existence we provide conditions for uniqueness our model both unites diverse strands of the earlier literature and opens up uncharted areas for future analysis in particular we expand the traditional one dimensional framework to allow for multi dimen sional product differentiation our approach involves twin restrictions on consumer preferences one on individuals preferences the other on the distribution of preferences across society these are generalizations of the restrictions supporting 64 majority rule presented in caplin and nalebuff 1988 to prove existence we apply a new technique of aggregation this technique is valuable in a variety of other problems in the companion paper we use the aggregation result to generalize our earlier work on 64 majority rule and to characterize the relationship between the distribution of human capital and the distribution of income caplin and nalebuff 1991 there are additional applications in statistics and in search theory we begin with a brief review of the early literature on imperfect competition describing in more detail the existence problem and previous solutions section 3 presents our twin assumptions and shows that they cover many standard cases in section 4 we introduce the aggregation theorem and use it in the analysis of demand functions the proof of existence of equilibrium is in section