Abdolkarim Sadrieh

Axel Ockenfels

Reinhard Selten, to date the only German Nobel Prize laureate in economics, celebrates his 80th birthday in 2010. While his contributions to game theory are well-known, the behavioral side of his scientific work has received less public exposure, even though he has been committed to experimental research during his entire career, publishing more experimental than theoretical papers in top-tier journals. This Festschrift is dedicated to Reinhard Selten’s exceptional influence on behavioral and experimental economics. In this collection of academic highlight papers, a number of his students are joined by leading scholars in experimental research to document the historical role of the “Meister” in the development of the research methodology and of several sub-fields of behavioral economics. Next to the academic insight in these highly active fields of experimental research, the papers also provide a glance at Reinhard Selten’s academic and personal interaction with his students and peers.

A Collection of Essays in Honor of Reinhard Selten

The Selten School of Behavioral Economics

The alternating double auction market institution is presented as a discrete time version of the open outcry market. The game in extensive form is analyzed in an almost perfect information setting, using the concept of subgame perfectness. By applying two new equilibrium selection criteria, a general existence result is obtained for "impatience equilibria" of the game. All such equilibria are shown to have unique properties concerning the traded quantities and prices. The most important results are that the equilibrium prices are independent of the number of traders and are always very close to - if not inside - the range of competitive prices. The latter can be evaluated as game theoretic support for the convergence of prices to the competitive price. The process of price formation is traced by applying the learning direction theory and introducing the "anchor price hypothesis".

Abdolkarim Sadrieh

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