Monotone imitation

We analyze the social learning process of a group of individuals who have limited information about the payoff distributions of each action. We say that a behavioral rule is first-order monotone (FOM) if the number of individuals who play actions with first-order stochastic dominant payoff distributions is expected to increase in any environment. We provide a characterization of FOM rules. Both Imitate if Better and Schlag’s (J Econ Theory 78:130–156, 1998) Proportional Imitation rule are FOM. No FOM rule is dominant in the sense of having the best performance in every environment.