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Draft chapter from An introduction to game theory by Martin J. Osborne. Version: 2002/7/23. Martin.Osborne@utoronto.ca http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne Copyright © 1995–2002 by Martin J. Osborne. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from Oxford University Press, except that one copy of up to six chapters may be made by any individual for private study.

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Nash Equilibrium: Theory

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10

Strategic games 11 Example: the Prisoner’s Dilemma 12 Example: Bach or Stravinsky? 16 Example: Matching Pennies 17 Example: the Stag Hunt 18 Nash equilibrium 19 Examples of Nash equilibrium 24 Best response functions 33 Dominated actions 43 Equilibrium in a single population: symmetric games and symmetric equilibria 49 Prerequisite: Chapter 1.

2.1 Strategic games is a model of interacting decision-makers. In recognition of the interaction, we refer to the decision-makers as players. Each player has a set of possible actions. The model captures interaction between the players by allowing each player to be affected by the actions of all players, not only her own action. Specifically, each player has preferences about the action profile—the list of all the players’ actions. (See Section 17.4, in the mathematical appendix, for a discussion of profiles.) More precisely, a strategic game is defined as follows. (The qualification “with ordinal preferences” distinguishes this notion of a strategic game from a more general notion studied in Chapter 4.)

A

STRATEGIC GAME

D EFINITION 11.1 (Strategic game with ordinal preferences) A strategic game (with ordinal preferences) consists of • a set of players • for each player, a set of actions • for each player, preferences over

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