Coalitional stochastic stability in games, networks and markets

This paper examines a dynamic process of unilateral and joint deviations of agents and the resulting stochastic evolution of social conventions in a class of interactions that includes normal form games, network formation games, and simple exchange economies. Over time agents unilaterally and jointly revise their strategies based on the improvements that the new strategy profile offers them. In addition to the optimization process, there are persistent random shocks on agents utility that potentially lead to switching to suboptimal strategies. Under a logit specification of choice probabilities, we characterize the set of states that will be observed in the long-run as noise vanishes. We apply these results to examples including certain potential games and coalitional bargaining games.