Experiments of learning in continuous time with extremely limited information and (nearly) continuous action sets demonstrate the lack of convergence for a Cournot oligopoly with differentiated products, a dominance solvable game, for both synchronous and asynchronous play. In the asynchronous setting, play tends toward the Stackelberg outcome. Convergence is significantly more robust for a "Serial Cost Sharing" game, which satisfies a stronger solution concept. However, as the number of players grows, this advantage tends to diminish. These results seem to be driven by high and correlated experimentation or noise and demonstrate that even when play converges, the convergence times may be too long to be of practical significance.

Co-authors Eric Friedman, Scott Shenker and Barry Sopher