Vol. 58, No. 6 (Nov., 1990) | Paul Milgrom and John Roberts
The paper by Paul Milgrom and John Roberts explores a broad class of noncooperative games, including models of oligopoly competition, macroeconomic coordination failures, arms races, bank runs, technology adoption, R&D competition, pretrial bargaining, and team coordination. The authors focus on supermodular games, where each player's strategy set is partially ordered, and the marginal returns to increasing one's strategy rise with increases in competitors' strategies, exhibiting strategic complementarity. They establish that for these games, the sets of pure strategy Nash equilibria, correlated equilibria, and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds. Additionally, for a class of dynamic adaptive choice behaviors, including best-response dynamics and Bayesian learning, players' choices eventually fall within the same bounds. These bounds vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters. The paper also introduces a comprehensive theory of adaptive dynamics applicable to supermodular games, showing that the bounds on eventual behavior under adaptive dynamics coincide with those predicted by other noncooperative solution concepts. The authors provide several theorems to aid in comparative statics and welfare analyses, including a welfare theorem that identifies Pareto-best and Pareto-worst equilibria under certain conditions. The analysis is supported by examples from various economic applications, demonstrating the practical relevance of the theoretical results.The paper by Paul Milgrom and John Roberts explores a broad class of noncooperative games, including models of oligopoly competition, macroeconomic coordination failures, arms races, bank runs, technology adoption, R&D competition, pretrial bargaining, and team coordination. The authors focus on supermodular games, where each player's strategy set is partially ordered, and the marginal returns to increasing one's strategy rise with increases in competitors' strategies, exhibiting strategic complementarity. They establish that for these games, the sets of pure strategy Nash equilibria, correlated equilibria, and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds. Additionally, for a class of dynamic adaptive choice behaviors, including best-response dynamics and Bayesian learning, players' choices eventually fall within the same bounds. These bounds vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters. The paper also introduces a comprehensive theory of adaptive dynamics applicable to supermodular games, showing that the bounds on eventual behavior under adaptive dynamics coincide with those predicted by other noncooperative solution concepts. The authors provide several theorems to aid in comparative statics and welfare analyses, including a welfare theorem that identifies Pareto-best and Pareto-worst equilibria under certain conditions. The analysis is supported by examples from various economic applications, demonstrating the practical relevance of the theoretical results.