IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/att/wimass/9314.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Structural Indifference in Normal Form Games

Author

Listed:
  • Mailath, G.J.
  • Samuelson, L.
  • Swinkels, J.M.

Abstract

Refinements of the Nash equilibrium concept differ in which indifferences between strategies they select for evaluation. In this paper, we suggest that "structural" indifferences, or indifferences that arise out of the structure of the payoffs of the game independently of opponents' strategies, are worthy of special attention. We define an order over a player's strategies, called the structured order, by ranking strategies according to expected payoff under a belief about opponents' play and requiring that (only) structural indifferences be evaluated by appealing to higher-order beliefs about opponents' play. This order is robust to trembles in payoffs and beliefs and ranks strategy r [sub]i ahead of s[sub]i if and only if r[sub]i receives a higher payoff along every sequence of trembles that converges (in a certain sense) to the beliefs. We use the structural order to define an equilibrium concept called the structural indifference respecting equilibrium (SIRE). A proper equilibrium is SIRE but not conversely. We show that thge lexicographic probability system used to describe beliefs about opponents' play when defining SIRE can always be taken to have disjoing supports. Finally, we argue that SIRE can be viewed as a normal form extention of the sequential equilibrium concept. Keywords: refinements, proper equilibrium, sequential equilibrium, trembles lexicographic probability systems, indifferences. JEL Classification Numbers: C70, C72.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Mailath, G.J. & Samuelson, L. & Swinkels, J.M., 1993. "Structural Indifference in Normal Form Games," Working papers 9314, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
  • Handle: RePEc:att:wimass:9314
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    game theory;

    JEL classification:

    • C70 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - General
    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:att:wimass:9314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ailsenne Sumwalt (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.