H Peyton Young

Ph.D., University of Michigan, FBA, Fellow of the Econometric Society

James Meade Professor of Economics

College or Institution: Nuffield College

Email address: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Research Interests

Summary: Social norms and institutions, game theory, learning in strategic environments

My current research is concerned with the question of whether people can learn to play equilibrium when they start in out-of-equilibrium conditions and there is no common knowledge of the game being played. This problem is especially acute in games involving hundreds or thousands of dispersed players who have little or no information about what other players are doing. Examples include communication on the internet, commuting in city traffic, and trading in on-line markets. In a series of recent papers I show that there exist very simple reinforcement-type learning rules that lead to equilibrium behavior in such systems. This is an outgrowth of my earlier work showing how norms and conventions can be understood as population-level equilibria that arise through a bottom-up process of individual adaptation rather than being imposed from above. The theory shows why some equilibria are more likely to emerge than others, and how they can be characterized in terms of their welfare properties.