This paper considers populations of agents whose behavior when playing some underlying game is governed by perturbed best (or better) response dynamics with perturbation probabilities that depend log-linearly on payoffs, a class that includes the logit choice rule. A convention is a state at which every agent plays a strategy that corresponds to the same strict Nash equilibrium of the underlying game. For coordination games with zero payoff off-diagonal, it is shown that the difficulty of leaving the basin of attraction of a convention can be well approximated by only considering paths of transitions on which an identical perturbation repeatedly affects one of the populations.

Coauthored with Sung-Ha Hwang.

Published in Economic Theory (2016). Link to paper.