Expedient and Monotone Learning Rules

This paper considers a learning rules for environments in which little prior information is available to the decision maker. Two properties of such learning rules, absolute expediency and monotonicity, are studied. The paper provides some necessary, and some su¢cient conditions for these properties. A number of examples show that the there is a quite a large variety of learning rules which have the properties. It is also shown that all learning rules which have these properties are, in some sense, related to the replicator dynamics of evolutionary game theory.