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Pure strategy dominance with quasiconcave utility functions

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  • Tijmen Daniëls

    (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Abstract

By a result of Pearce (1984), in a finite strategic form game, the set of a player's serially undominated strategies coincides with her set of rationalizable strategies. In this note we consider an extension of this result that applies to games with continuous utility functions that are quasiconcave in own action. We prove that in such games, when the players are endowed with compact, metrizable, and convex action spaces, a strategy of some player is dominated by some other pure strategy if and only if it is not a best reply to any belief over the strategies adopted by her opponents. For own-quasiconcave games, this can be used to give a characterization of the set of rationalizable strategies, different from the one given by Pearce. Moreover, expected utility functions defined on the mixed extension of a game are always own-quasiconcave, and therefore the result in this note generalizes Pearce''s characterization to infinite games, by a simple shift of perspective.

Suggested Citation

  • Tijmen Daniëls, 2008. "Pure strategy dominance with quasiconcave utility functions," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 3(54), pages 1-8.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-08c70023
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Alexander Zimper, 2005. "Equivalence between best responses and undominated strategies: a generalization from finite to compact strategy sets," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 3(7), pages 1-6.
    2. Pearce, David G, 1984. "Rationalizable Strategic Behavior and the Problem of Perfection," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(4), pages 1029-1050, July.
    3. Apt Krzysztof R., 2007. "The Many Faces of Rationalizability," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 7(1), pages 1-39, May.
    4. Zimper, Alexander, 2005. "Equivalence between best responses and undominated," Papers 05-08, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.
    5. Martin J. Osborne & Ariel Rubinstein, 1994. "A Course in Game Theory," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262650401, December.
    6. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:3:y:2005:i:7:p:1-6 is not listed on IDEAS
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    Cited by:

    1. Yi-Chun Chen & Xiao Luo, 2012. "An indistinguishability result on rationalizability under general preferences," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 51(1), pages 1-12, September.
    2. Bulat Gafarov & Bruno Salcedo, 2015. "Ordinal dominance and risk aversion," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 3(2), pages 287-298, October.

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    JEL classification:

    • C7 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory

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