Savage games

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Grant, Simon; Meneghel, Idione; Tourky, Rabee
• 署名单位: Australian National University; University of Queensland
• 刊物名称: THEORETICAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1933-6837
• DOI: 10.3982/TE2068
• 发表日期: 2016-05-01
• 页码: 641-682
• 关键词: Subjective uncertainty; strategic interaction; strategically irrelevant events; ambiguity; Bayesian games

摘要

We define and discuss Savage games, which are ordinal games of incomplete information set in L. J. Savage's framework of purely subjective uncertainty. Every Bayesian game is ordinally equivalent to a Savage game. However, Savage games are free of priors, probabilities, and payoffs. Players' information and subjective attitudes toward uncertainty are encoded in the state-dependent preferences over state contingent action profiles. In the class of games we consider, player preferences satisfy versions of Savage's sure-thing principle and small event continuity postulate. Savage games provide a tractable framework for studying attitudes toward uncertainty in a strategic setting. The work eschews any notion of objective randomization, convexity, monotonicity, or independence of beliefs. We provide a number of examples illustrating the usefulness of the framework, including novel results for a purely ordinal matching game that satisfies all of our assumptions and for games for which the preferences of the players admit representations from a wide class of decision-theoretic models.