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Prof. Sven Rady

University of Bonn, Germany

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Authors: Sven Rady, Johannes Hörner, Nicolas Klein

Abstract: This talk presents a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits in which payoffs on the risky arm are generated by a compound Poisson process. The distribution of payoff increments depends on an unkown state of the world, whereas the arrival rate of such increments does not. As a consequence, players learn exclusively from the size of the lump-sum payoffs they obtain. Under perfect monitoring, the piecewise constancy of beliefs allows for an analysis of stationary Markov equilibria with essentially discrete-time techniques. In turn, these Markov equilibria constitute perfect Bayesian equilibria when players observe all payoffs, but not each other’s actions. The construction of equilibria that improve on the Markovian ones is the focus of ongoing work.