Robustness to strategic uncertainty

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Andersson, Ola; Argenton, Cedric; Weibull, Jorgen W.
• 署名单位: Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN); Tilburg University; Tilburg University; Stockholm School of Economics; Royal Institute of Technology
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2014.01.018
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 272-288
• 关键词: Nash equilibrium; refinement; strategic uncertainty; Bertrand competition; Log-concavity

摘要

We introduce a criterion for robustness to strategic uncertainty in games with continuum strategy sets. We model a player's uncertainty about another player's strategy as an atomless probability distribution over that player's strategy set. We call a strategy profile robust to strategic uncertainty if it is the limit, as uncertainty vanishes, of some sequence of strategy profiles in which every player's strategy is optimal under his or her uncertainty about the others. When payoff functions are continuous we show that our criterion is a refinement of Nash equilibrium and we also give sufficient conditions for existence of a robust strategy profile. In addition, we apply the criterion to Bertrand games with convex costs, a class of games with discontinuous payoff functions and a continuum of Nash equilibria. We show that it then selects a unique Nash equilibrium, in agreement with some recent experimental findings. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.