Minimally incomplete sampling and convergence of adaptive play in $$2\times 2$$ games

Abstract

Adaptive learning explains how conventions emerge in populations in which players sample a sufficiently small portion of the recent plays and best reply to those samples. We establish that in \(2\times 2\) coordination games any degree of incomplete sampling is sufficient for a convention to be established and that the degree of sampling does not affect which conventions are most likely to emerge in the long run. Thus, the bound that players sample at most half of the plays available to them, which is prevalent in the large body of work that uses adaptive learning to examine which conventions emerge in a variety of games, is unnecessarily strict.