First published Sat Jan 25, 1997; substantive revision Fri Mar 8, 2019

Game theory is the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents, where the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents. The meaning of this statement will not be clear to the non-expert until each of the italicized words and phrases has been explained and featured in some examples. Doing this will be the main business of this article. First, however, we provide some historical and philosophical context in order to motivate the reader for the technical work ahead.

Game theory in the form known to economists, social scientists, and biologists, was given its first general mathematical formulation by John von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstern (1944). For reasons to be discussed later, limitations in their formal framework initially made the theory applicable only under special and limited conditions. This situation has dramatically changed, in ways we will examine as we go along, over the past seven decades, as the framework has been deepened and generalized. Refinements are still being made, and we will review a few outstanding problems that lie along the advancing front edge of these developments towards the end of the article. However, since at least the late 1970s it has been possible to say with confidence that game theory is the most important and useful tool in the analyst’s kit whenever she confronts situations in which what counts as one agent’s best action (for her) depends on expectations about what one or more other agents will do, and what counts as their best actions (for them) similarly depend on expectations about her.

Despite the fact that game theory has been rendered mathematically and logically systematic only since 1944, game-theoretic insights can be found among commentators going back to ancient times. For example, in two of Plato’s texts, the Laches and the Symposium, Socrates recalls an episode from the Battle of Delium that some commentators have interpreted (probably anachronistically) as involving the following situation. Consider a soldier at the front, waiting with his comrades to repulse an enemy attack. It may occur to him that if the defense is likely to be successful, then it isn’t very probable that his own personal contribution will be essential. But if he stays, he runs the risk of being killed or wounded—apparently for no point. On the other hand, if the enemy is going to win the battle, then his chances of death or injury are higher still, and now quite clearly to no point, since the line will be overwhelmed anyway. Based on this reasoning, it would appear that the soldier is better off running away regardless of who is going to win the battle. Of course, if all of the soldiers reason this way—as they all apparently should, since they’re all in identical situations—then this will certainly bring about the outcome in which the battle is lost. Of course, this point, since it has occurred to us as analysts, can occur to the soldiers too. Does this give them a reason for staying at their posts? Just the contrary: the greater the soldiers’ fear that the battle will be lost, the greater their incentive to get themselves out of harm’s way. And the greater the soldiers’ belief that the battle will be won, without the need of any particular individual’s contributions, the less reason they have to stay and fight. If each soldier anticipates this sort of reasoning on the part of the others, all will quickly reason themselves into a panic, and their horrified commander will have a rout on his hands before the enemy has even engaged.

Long before game theory had come along to show analysts how to think about this sort of problem systematically, it had occurred to some actual military leaders and influenced their strategies. Thus the Spanish conqueror Cortez, when landing in Mexico with a small force who had good reason to fear their capacity to repel attack from the far more numerous Aztecs, removed the risk that his troops might think their way into a retreat by burning the ships on which they had landed. With retreat having thus been rendered physically impossible, the Spanish soldiers had no better course of action than to stand and fight—and, furthermore, to fight with as much determination as they could muster. Better still, from Cortez’s point of view, his action had a discouraging effect on the motivation of the Aztecs. He took care to burn his ships very visibly, so that the Aztecs would be sure to see what he had done. They then reasoned as follows: Any commander who could be so confident as to willfully destroy his own option to be prudent if the battle went badly for him must have good reasons for such extreme optimism. It cannot be wise to attack an opponent who has a good reason (whatever, exactly, it might be) for being sure that he can’t lose. The Aztecs therefore retreated into the surrounding hills, and Cortez had the easiest possible victory.

These two situations, at Delium and as manipulated by Cortez, have a common and interesting underlying logic. Notice that the soldiers are not motivated to retreat just, or even mainly, by their rational assessment of the dangers of battle and by their self-interest. Rather, they discover a sound reason to run away by realizing that what it makes sense for them to do depends on what it will make sense for others to do, and that all of the others can notice this too. Even a quite brave soldier may prefer to run rather than heroically, but pointlessly, die trying to stem the oncoming tide all by himself. Thus we could imagine, without contradiction, a circumstance in which an army, all of whose members are brave, flees at top speed before the enemy makes a move. If the soldiers really are brave, then this surely isn’t the outcome any of them wanted; each would have preferred that all stand and fight. What we have here, then, is a case in which the interaction of many individually rational decision-making processes—one process per soldier—produces an outcome intended by no one. (Most armies try to avoid this problem just as Cortez did. Since they can’t usually make retreat physically impossible, they make it economically impossible: they shoot deserters. Then standing and fighting is each soldier’s individually rational course of action after all, because the cost of running is sure to be at least as high as the cost of staying.)

Another classic source that invites this sequence of reasoning is found in Shakespeare’s Henry V. During the Battle of Agincourt Henry decided to slaughter his French prisoners, in full view of the enemy and to the surprise of his subordinates, who describe the action as being out of moral character. The reasons Henry gives allude to non-strategic considerations: he is afraid that the prisoners may free themselves and threaten his position. However, a game theorist might have furnished him with supplementary strategic (and similarly prudential, though perhaps not moral) justification. His own troops observe that the prisoners have been killed, and observe that the enemy has observed this. Therefore, they know what fate will await them at the enemy’s hand if they don’t win. Metaphorically, but very effectively, their boats have been burnt. The slaughter of the prisoners plausibly sent a signal to the soldiers of both sides, thereby changing their incentives in ways that favoured English prospects for victory.

These examples might seem to be relevant only for those who find themselves in sordid situations of cut-throat competition. Perhaps, one might think, it is important for generals, politicians, mafiosi, sports coaches and others whose jobs involve strategic manipulation of others, but the philosopher should only deplore its amorality. Such a conclusion would be highly premature, however. The study of the logic that governs the interrelationships amongst incentives, strategic interactions and outcomes has been fundamental in modern political philosophy, since centuries before anyone had an explicit name for this sort of logic. Philosophers share with social scientists the need to be able to represent and systematically model not only what they think people normatively ought to do, but what they often actually do in interactive situations.

Hobbes’s Leviathan is often regarded as the founding work in modern political philosophy, the text that began the continuing round of analyses of the function and justification of the state and its restrictions on individual liberties. The core of Hobbes’s reasoning can be given straightforwardly as follows. The best situation for all people is one in which each is free to do as she pleases. (One may or may not agree with this as a matter of psychology or ideology, but it is Hobbes’s assumption.) Often, such free people will wish to cooperate with one another in order to carry out projects that would be impossible for an individual acting alone. But if there are any immoral or amoral agents around, they will notice that their interests might at least sometimes be best served by getting the benefits from cooperation and not returning them. Suppose, for example, that you agree to help me build my house in return for my promise to help you build yours. After my house is finished, I can make your labour free to me simply by reneging on my promise. I then realize, however, that if this leaves you with no house, you will have an incentive to take mine. This will put me in constant fear of you, and force me to spend valuable time and resources guarding myself against you. I can best minimize these costs by striking first and killing you at the first opportunity. Of course, you can anticipate all of this reasoning by me, and so have good reason to try to beat me to the punch. Since I can anticipate this reasoning by you, my original fear of you was not paranoid; nor was yours of me. In fact, neither of us actually needs to be immoral to get this chain of mutual reasoning going; we need only think that there is some possibility that the other might try to cheat on bargains. Once a small wedge of doubt enters any one mind, the incentive induced by fear of the consequences of being preempted—hit before hitting first—quickly becomes overwhelming on both sides. If either of us has any resources of our own that the other might want, this murderous logic can take hold long before we are so silly as to imagine that we could ever actually get as far as making deals to help one another build houses in the first place. Left to their own devices, agents who are at least sometimes narrowly self-interested can repeatedly fail to derive the benefits of cooperation, and instead be trapped in a state of ‘war of all against all’, in Hobbes’s words. In these circumstances, human life, as he vividly and famously put it, will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Hobbes’s proposed solution to this problem was tyranny. The people can hire an agent—a government—whose job is to punish anyone who breaks any promise. So long as the threatened punishment is sufficiently dire then the cost of reneging on promises will exceed the cost of keeping them. The logic here is identical to that used by an army when it threatens to shoot deserters. If all people know that these incentives hold for most others, then cooperation will not only be possible, but can be the expected norm, so that the war of all against all becomes a general peace.

Hobbes pushes the logic of this argument to a very strong conclusion, arguing that it implies not only a government with the right and the power to enforce cooperation, but an ‘undivided’ government in which the arbitrary will of a single ruler must impose absolute obligation on all. Few contemporary political theorists think that the particular steps by which Hobbes reasons his way to this conclusion are both sound and valid. Working through these issues here, however, would carry us away from our topic into details of contractarian political philosophy. What is important in the present context is that these details, as they are in fact pursued in contemporary debates, involve sophisticated interpretation of the issues using the resources of modern game theory. Furthermore, Hobbes’s most basic point, that the fundamental justification for the coercive authority and practices of governments is peoples’ own need to protect themselves from what game theorists call ‘social dilemmas’, is accepted by many, if not most, political theorists. Notice that Hobbes has not argued that tyranny is a desirable thing in itself. The structure of his argument is that the logic of strategic interaction leaves only two general political outcomes possible: tyranny and anarchy. Sensible agents then choose tyranny as the lesser of two evils.

The reasoning of the Athenian soldiers, of Cortez, and of Hobbes’s political agents has a common logic, one derived from their situations. In each case, the aspect of the environment that is most important to the agents’ achievement of their preferred outcomes is the set of expectations and possible reactions to their strategies by other agents. The distinction between acting parametrically on a passive world and acting non-parametrically on a world that tries to act in anticipation of these actions is fundamental. If you wish to kick a rock down a hill, you need only concern yourself with the rock’s mass relative to the force of your blow, the extent to which it is bonded with its supporting surface, the slope of the ground on the other side of the rock, and the expected impact of the collision on your foot. The values of all of these variables are independent of your plans and intentions, since the rock has no interests of its own and takes no actions to attempt to assist or thwart you. By contrast, if you wish to kick a person down the hill, then unless that person is unconscious, bound or otherwise incapacitated, you will likely not succeed unless you can disguise your plans until it’s too late for him to take either evasive or forestalling action. Furthermore, his probable responses should be expected to visit costs upon you, which you would be wise to consider. Finally, the relative probabilities of his responses will depend on his expectations about your probable responses to his responses. (Consider the difference it will make to both of your reasoning if one or both of you are armed, or one of you is bigger than the other, or one of you is the other’s boss.) The logical issues associated with the second sort of situation (kicking the person as opposed to the rock) are typically much more complicated, as a simple hypothetical example will illustrate.

Suppose first that you wish to cross a river that is spanned by three bridges. (Assume that swimming, wading or boating across are impossible.) The first bridge is known to be safe and free of obstacles; if you try to cross there, you will succeed. The second bridge lies beneath a cliff from which large rocks sometimes fall. The third is inhabited by deadly cobras. Now suppose you wish to rank-order the three bridges with respect to their preferability as crossing-points. Unless you get positive enjoyment from risking your life—which, as a human being, you might, a complication we’ll take up later in this article—then your decision problem here is straightforward. The first bridge is obviously best, since it is safest. To rank-order the other two bridges, you require information about their relative levels of danger. If you can study the frequency of rock-falls and the movements of the cobras for awhile, you might be able to calculate that the probability of your being crushed by a rock at the second bridge is 10% and of being struck by a cobra at the third bridge is 20%. Your reasoning here is strictly parametric because neither the rocks nor the cobras are trying to influence your actions, by, for example, concealing their typical patterns of behaviour because they know you are studying them. It is obvious what you should do here: cross at the safe bridge. Now let us complicate the situation a bit. Suppose that the bridge with the rocks was immediately before you, while the safe bridge was a day’s difficult hike upstream. Your decision-making situation here is slightly more complicated, but it is still strictly parametric. You would have to decide whether the cost of the long hike was worth exchanging for the penalty of a 10% chance of being hit by a rock. However, this is all you must decide, and your probability of a successful crossing is entirely up to you; the environment is not interested in your plans.

However, if we now complicate the situation by adding a non-parametric element, it becomes more challenging. Suppose that you are a fugitive of some sort, and waiting on the other side of the river with a gun is your pursuer. She will catch and shoot you, let us suppose, only if she waits at the bridge you try to cross; otherwise, you will escape. As you reason through your choice of bridge, it occurs to you that she is over there trying to anticipate your reasoning. It will seem that, surely, choosing the safe bridge straight away would be a mistake, since that is just where she will expect you, and your chances of death rise to certainty. So perhaps you should risk the rocks, since these odds are much better. But wait … if you can reach this conclusion, your pursuer, who is just as rational and well-informed as you are, can anticipate that you will reach it, and will be waiting for you if you evade the rocks. So perhaps you must take your chances with the cobras; that is what she must least expect. But, then, no … if she expects that you will expect that she will least expect this, then she will most expect it. This dilemma, you realize with dread, is general: you must do what your pursuer least expects; but whatever you most expect her to least expect is automatically what she will most expect. You appear to be trapped in indecision. All that might console you a bit here is that, on the other side of the river, your pursuer is trapped in exactly the same quandary, unable to decide which bridge to wait at because as soon as she imagines committing to one, she will notice that if she can find a best reason to pick a bridge, you can anticipate that same reason and then avoid her.

We know from experience that, in situations such as this, people do not usually stand and dither in circles forever. As we’ll see later, there is a unique best solution available to each player. However, until the 1940s neither philosophers nor economists knew how to find it mathematically. As a result, economists were forced to treat non-parametric influences as if they were complications on parametric ones. This is likely to strike the reader as odd, since, as our example of the bridge-crossing problem was meant to show, non-parametric features are often fundamental features of decision-making problems. Part of the explanation for game theory’s relatively late entry into the field lies in the problems with which economists had historically been concerned. Classical economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were mainly interested in the question of how agents in very large markets—whole nations—could interact so as to bring about maximum monetary wealth for themselves. Smith’s basic insight, that efficiency is best maximized by agents first differentiating their potential contributions and then freely seeking mutually advantageous bargains, was mathematically verified in the twentieth century. However, the demonstration of this fact applies only in conditions of ‘perfect competition,’ that is, when individuals or firms face no costs of entry or exit into markets, when there are no economies of scale, and when no agents’ actions have unintended side-effects on other agents’ well-being. Economists always recognized that this set of assumptions is purely an idealization for purposes of analysis, not a possible state of affairs anyone could try (or should want to try) to institutionally establish. But until the mathematics of game theory matured near the end of the 1970s, economists had to hope that the more closely a market approximates perfect competition, the more efficient it will be. No such hope, however, can be mathematically or logically justified in general; indeed, as a strict generalization the assumption was shown to be false as far back as the 1950s.

This article is not about the foundations of economics, but it is important for understanding the origins and scope of game theory to know that perfectly competitive markets have built into them a feature that renders them susceptible to parametric analysis. Because agents face no entry costs to markets, they will open shop in any given market until competition drives all profits to zero. This implies that if production costs are fixed and demand is exogenous, then agents have no options about how much to produce if they are trying to maximize the differences between their costs and their revenues. These production levels can be determined separately for each agent, so none need pay attention to what the others are doing; each agent treats her counterparts as passive features of the environment. The other kind of situation to which classical economic analysis can be applied without recourse to game theory is that of a monopoly facing many customers. Here, as long as no customer has a share of demand large enough to exert strategic leverage, non-parametric considerations drop out and the firm’s task is only to identify the combination of price and production quantity at which it maximizes profit. However, both perfect and monopolistic competition are very special and unusual market arrangements. Prior to the advent of game theory, therefore, economists were severely limited in the class of circumstances to which they could straightforwardly apply their models.

Philosophers share with economists a professional interest in the conditions and techniques for the maximization of welfare. In addition, philosophers have a special concern with the logical justification of actions, and often actions must be justified by reference to their expected outcomes. (One tradition in moral philosophy, utilitarianism, is based on the idea that all justifiable actions must be justified in this way.) Without game theory, both of these problems resist analysis wherever non-parametric aspects are relevant. We will demonstrate this shortly by reference to the most famous (though not the most typical) game, the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma, and to other, more typical, games. In doing this, we will need to introduce, define and illustrate the basic elements and techniques of game theory.

An economic agent is, by definition, an entity with preferences. Game theorists, like economists and philosophers studying rational decision-making, describe these by means of an abstract concept called utility. This refers to some ranking, on some specified scale, of the subjective welfare or change in subjective welfare that an agent derives from an object or an event. By ‘welfare’ we refer to some normative index of relative alignment between states of the world and agents’ valuations of the states in question, justified by reference to some background framework. For example, we might evaluate the relative welfare of countries (which we might model as agents for some purposes) by reference to their per capita incomes, and we might evaluate the relative welfare of an animal, in the context of predicting and explaining its behavioral dispositions, by reference to its expected evolutionary fitness. In the case of people, it is most typical in economics and applications of game theory to evaluate their relative welfare by reference to their own implicit or explicit judgments of it. This is why we referred above to subjective welfare. Consider a person who adores the taste of pickles but dislikes onions. She might be said to associate higher utility with states of the world in which, all else being equal, she consumes more pickles and fewer onions than with states in which she consumes more onions and fewer pickles. Examples of this kind suggest that ‘utility’ denotes a measure of subjective psychological fulfillment, and this is indeed how the concept was originally interpreted by economists and philosophers influenced by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. However, economists in the early 20th century recognized increasingly clearly that their main interest was in the market property of decreasing marginal demand, regardless of whether that was produced by satiated individual consumers or by some other factors. In the 1930s this motivation of economists fit comfortably with the dominance of behaviourism and radical empiricism in psychology and in the philosophy of science respectively. Behaviourists and radical empiricists objected to the theoretical use of such unobservable entities as ‘psychological fulfillment quotients.’ The intellectual climate was thus receptive to the efforts of the economist Paul Samuelson (1938) to redefine utility in such a way that it becomes a purely technical concept rather than one rooted in speculative psychology. Since Samuelson’s redefinition became standard in the 1950s, when we say that an agent acts so as to maximize her utility, we mean by ‘utility’ simply whatever it is that the agent’s behavior suggests her to consistently act so as to make more probable. If this looks circular to you, it should: theorists who follow Samuelson intend the statement ‘agents act so as to maximize their utility’ as a tautology, where an ‘(economic) agent’ is any entity that can be accurately described as acting to maximize a utility function, an ‘action’ is any utility-maximizing selection from a set of possible alternatives, and a‘utility function’ is what an economic agent maximizes. Like other tautologies occurring in the foundations of scientific theories, this interlocking (recursive) system of definitions is useful not in itself, but because it helps to fix our contexts of inquiry.

Though the behaviourism of the 1930s has since been displaced by widespread interest in cognitive processes, many theorists continue to follow Samuelson’s way of understanding utility because they think it important that game theory apply to any kind of agent—a person, a bear, a bee, a firm or a country—and not just to agents with human minds. When such theorists say that agents act so as to maximize their utility, they want this to be part of the definition of what it is to be an agent, not an empirical claim about possible inner states and motivations. Samuelson’s conception of utility, defined by way of Revealed Preference Theory (RPT) introduced in his classic paper (Samuelson (1938)) satisfies this demand.

Economists and others who interpret game theory in terms of RPT should not think of game theory as in any way an empirical account of the motivations of some flesh-and-blood actors (such as actual people). Rather, they should regard game theory as part of the body of mathematics that is used to model those entities (which might or might not literally exist) who consistently select elements from mutually exclusive action sets, resulting in patterns of choices, which, allowing for some stochasticity and noise, can be statistically modeled as maximization of utility functions. On this interpretation, game theory could not be refuted by any empirical observations, since it is not an empirical theory in the first place. Of course, observation and experience could lead someone favoring this interpretation to conclude that game theory is of little help in describing actual human behavior.

Some other theorists understand the point of game theory differently. They view game theory as providing an explanatory account of actual human strategic reasoning processes. For this idea to be applicable, we must suppose that agents at least sometimes do what they do in non-parametric settings because game-theoretic logic recommends certain actions as the ‘rational’ ones. Such an understanding of game theory incorporates a normative aspect, since ‘rationality’ is taken to denote a property that an agent should at least generally want to have. These two very general ways of thinking about the possible uses of game theory are compatible with the tautological interpretation of utility maximization. The philosophical difference is not idle from the perspective of the working game theorist, however. As we will see in a later section, those who hope to use game theory to explain strategic reasoning, as opposed to merely strategic behavior, face some special philosophical and practical problems.

Since game theory is a technology for formal modeling, we must have a device for thinking of utility maximization in mathematical terms. Such a device is called a utility function. We will introduce the general idea of a utility function through the special case of an ordinal utility function. (Later, we will encounter utility functions that incorporate more information.) The utility-map for an agent is called a ‘function’ because it maps ordered preferences onto the real numbers. Suppose that agent x prefers bundle a to bundle b and bundle b to bundle c. We then map these onto a list of numbers, where the function maps the highest-ranked bundle onto the largest number in the list, the second-highest-ranked bundle onto the next-largest number in the list, and so on, thus:

bundle a ≫ 3 bundle b ≫ 2 bundle c ≫ 1

The only property mapped by this function is order. The magnitudes of the numbers are irrelevant; that is, it must not be inferred that x gets 3 times as much utility from bundle a as she gets from bundle c. Thus we could represent exactly the same utility function as that above by

bundle a ≫ 7,326 bundle b ≫ 12.6 bundle c ≫ −1,000,000

The numbers featuring in an ordinal utility function are thus not measuring any quantity of anything. A utility-function in which magnitudes do matter is called ‘cardinal’. Whenever someone refers to a utility function without specifying which kind is meant, you should assume that it’s ordinal. These are the sorts we’ll need for the first set of games we’ll examine. Later, when we come to seeing how to solve games that involve (ex ante) uncertainty—our river-crossing game from Part 1 above, for example—we’ll need to build cardinal utility functions. The technique for doing this was given by von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944), and was an essential aspect of their invention of game theory. For the moment, however, we will need only ordinal functions.

All situations in which at least one agent can only act to maximize his utility through anticipating (either consciously, or just implicitly in his behavior) the responses to his actions by one or more other agents is called a game. Agents involved in games are referred to as players. If all agents have optimal actions regardless of what the others do, as in purely parametric situations or conditions of monopoly or perfect competition (see Section 1 above) we can model this without appeal to game theory; otherwise, we need it.

Game theorists assume that players have sets of capacities that are typically referred to in the literature of economics as comprising ‘rationality’. Usually this is formulated by simple statements such as ‘it is assumed that players are rational’. In literature critical of economics in general, or of the importation of game theory into humanistic disciplines, this kind of rhetoric has increasingly become a magnet for attack. There is a dense and intricate web of connections associated with ‘rationality’ in the Western cultural tradition, and the word has often been used to normatively marginalize characteristics as normal and important as emotion, femininity and empathy. Game theorists’ use of the concept need not, and generally does not, implicate such ideology. For present purposes we will use ‘economic rationality’ as a strictly technical, not normative, term to refer to a narrow and specific set of restrictions on preferences that are shared by von Neumann and Morgenstern’s original version of game theory, and RPT. Economists use a second, equally important (to them) concept of rationality when they are modeling markets, which they call ‘rational expectations’. In this phrase, ‘rationality’ refers not to restrictions on preferences but to non-restrictions on information processing: rational expectations are idealized beliefs that reflect statistically accurately weighted use of all information available to an agent. The reader should note that these two uses of one word within the same discipline are technically unconnected. Furthermore, original RPT has been specified over the years by several different sets of axioms for different modeling purposes. Once we decide to treat rationality as a technical concept, each time we adjust the axioms we effectively modify the concept. Consequently, in any discussion involving economists and philosophers together, we can find ourselves in a situation where different participants use the same word to refer to something different. For readers new to economics, game theory, decision theory and the philosophy of action, this situation naturally presents a challenge.

In this article, ‘economic rationality’ will be used in the technical sense shared within game theory, microeconomics and formal decision theory, as follows. An economically rational player is one who can (i) assess outcomes, in the sense of rank-ordering them with respect to their contributions to her welfare; (ii) calculate paths to outcomes, in the sense of recognizing which sequences of actions are probabilistically associated with which outcomes; and (iii) select actions from sets of alternatives (which we’ll describe as ‘choosing’ actions) that yield her most-preferred outcomes, given the actions of the other players. We might summarize the intuition behind all this as follows: an entity is usefully modeled as an economically rational agent to the extent that it has alternatives, and chooses from amongst these in a way that is motivated, at least more often than not, by what seems best for its purposes. (For readers who are antecedently familiar with the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, we could equate the idea of an economically rational agent with the kind of entity Dennett characterizes as intentional, and then say that we can usefully predict an economically rational agent’s behavior from ‘the intentional stance’.)

Economic rationality might in some cases be satisfied by internal computations performed by an agent, and she might or might not be aware of computing or having computed its conditions and implications. In other cases, economic rationality might simply be embodied in behavioral dispositions built by natural, cultural or market selection. In particular, in calling an action ‘chosen’ we imply no necessary deliberation, conscious or otherwise. We mean merely that the action was taken when an alternative action was available, in some sense of ‘available’ normally established by the context of the particular analysis. (‘Available’, as used by game theorists and economists, should never be read as if it meant merely ‘metaphysically’ or ‘logically’ available; it is almost always pragmatic, contextual and endlessly revisable by more refined modeling.)

Each player in a game faces a choice among two or more possible strategies. A strategy is a predetermined ‘programme of play’ that tells her what actions to take in response to every possible strategy other players might use. The significance of the italicized phrase here will become clear when we take up some sample games below.

A crucial aspect of the specification of a game involves the information that players have when they choose strategies. The simplest games (from the perspective of logical structure) are those in which agents have perfect information, meaning that at every point where each agent’s strategy tells her to take an action, she knows everything that has happened in the game up to that point. A board-game of sequential moves in which both players watch all the action (and know the rules in common), such as chess, is an instance of such a game. By contrast, the example of the bridge-crossing game from Section 1 above illustrates a game of imperfect information, since the fugitive must choose a bridge to cross without knowing the bridge at which the pursuer has chosen to wait, and the pursuer similarly makes her decision in ignorance of the choices of her quarry. Since game theory is about economically rational action given the strategically significant actions of others, it should not surprise you to be told that what agents in games believe, or fail to believe, about each others’ actions makes a considerable difference to the logic of our analyses, as we will see.

The difference between games of perfect and of imperfect information is related to (though certainly not identical with!) a distinction between ways of representing games that is based on order of play. Let us begin by distinguishing between sequential-move and simultaneous-move games in terms of information. It is natural, as a first approximation, to think of sequential-move games as being ones in which players choose their strategies one after the other, and of simultaneous-move games as ones in which players choose their strategies at the same time. This isn’t quite right, however, because what is of strategic importance is not the temporal order of events per se, but whether and when players know about other players’ actions relative to having to choose their own. For example, if two competing businesses are both planning marketing campaigns, one might commit to its strategy months before the other does; but if neither knows what the other has committed to or will commit to when they make their decisions, this is a simultaneous-move game. Chess, by contrast, is normally played as a sequential-move game: you see what your opponent has done before choosing your own next action. (Chess can be turned into a simultaneous-move game if the players each call moves on a common board while isolated from one another; but this is a very different game from conventional chess.)

It was said above that the distinction between sequential-move and simultaneous-move games is not identical to the distinction between perfect-information and imperfect-information games. Explaining why this is so is a good way of establishing full understanding of both sets of concepts. As simultaneous-move games were characterized in the previous paragraph, it must be true that all simultaneous-move games are games of imperfect information. However, some games may contain mixes of sequential and simultaneous moves. For example, two firms might commit to their marketing strategies independently and in secrecy from one another, but thereafter engage in pricing competition in full view of one another. If the optimal marketing strategies were partially or wholly dependent on what was expected to happen in the subsequent pricing game, then the two stages would need to be analyzed as a single game, in which a stage of sequential play followed a stage of simultaneous play. Whole games that involve mixed stages of this sort are games of imperfect information, however temporally staged they might be. Games of perfect information (as the name implies) denote cases where no moves are simultaneous (and where no player ever forgets what has gone before).

As previously noted, games of perfect information are the (logically) simplest sorts of games. This is so because in such games (as long as the games are finite, that is, terminate after a known number of actions) players and analysts can use a straightforward procedure for predicting outcomes. A player in such a game chooses her first action by considering each series of responses and counter-responses that will result from each action open to her. She then asks herself which of the available final outcomes brings her the highest utility, and chooses the action that starts the chain leading to this outcome. This process is called backward induction (because the reasoning works backwards from eventual outcomes to present choice problems).

There will be much more to be said about backward induction and its properties in a later section (when we come to discuss equilibrium and equilibrium selection). For now, it has been described just so we can use it to introduce one of the two types of mathematical objects used to represent games: game trees. A game tree is an example of what mathematicians call a directed graph. That is, it is a set of connected nodes in which the overall graph has a direction. We can draw trees from the top of the page to the bottom, or from left to right. In the first case, nodes at the top of the page are interpreted as coming earlier in the sequence of actions. In the case of a tree drawn from left to right, leftward nodes are prior in the sequence to rightward ones. An unlabelled tree has a structure of the following sort:

Figure 1

The point of representing games using trees can best be grasped by visualizing the use of them in supporting backward-induction reasoning. Just imagine the player (or analyst) beginning at the end of the tree, where outcomes are displayed, and then working backwards from these, looking for sets of strategies that describe paths leading to them. Since a player’s utility function indicates which outcomes she prefers to which, we also know which paths she will prefer. Of course, not all paths will be possible because the other player has a role in selecting paths too, and won’t take actions that lead to less preferred outcomes for him. We will present some examples of this interactive path selection, and detailed techniques for reasoning through these examples, after we have described a situation we can use a tree to model.

Trees are used to represent sequential games, because they show the order in which actions are taken by the players. However, games are sometimes represented on matrices rather than trees. This is the second type of mathematical object used to represent games. Matrices, unlike trees, simply show the outcomes, represented in terms of the players’ utility functions, for every possible combination of strategies the players might use. For example, it makes sense to display the river-crossing game from Section 1 on a matrix, since in that game both the fugitive and the hunter have just one move each, and each chooses their move in ignorance of what the other has decided to do. Here, then, is part of the matrix:

Figure 2

The fugitive’s three possible strategies—cross at the safe bridge, risk the rocks, or risk the cobras—form the rows of the matrix. Similarly, the hunter’s three possible strategies—waiting at the safe bridge, waiting at the rocky bridge and waiting at the cobra bridge—form the columns of the matrix. Each cell of the matrix shows—or, rather would show if our matrix was complete—an outcome defined in terms of the players’ payoffs. A player’s payoff is simply the number assigned by her ordinal utility function to the state of affairs corresponding to the outcome in question. For each outcome, Row’s payoff is always listed first, followed by Column’s. Thus, for example, the upper left-hand corner above shows that when the fugitive crosses at the safe bridge and the hunter is waiting there, the fugitive gets a payoff of 0 and the hunter gets a payoff of 1. We interpret these by reference to the two players’ utility functions, which in this game are very simple. If the fugitive gets safely across the river he receives a payoff of 1; if he doesn’t he gets 0. If the fugitive doesn’t make it, either because he’s shot by the hunter or hit by a rock or bitten by a cobra, then the hunter gets a payoff of 1 and the fugitive gets a payoff of 0.

We’ll briefly explain the parts of the matrix that have been filled in, and then say why we can’t yet complete the rest. Whenever the hunter waits at the bridge chosen by the fugitive, the fugitive is shot. These outcomes all deliver the payoff vector (0, 1). You can find them descending diagonally across the matrix above from the upper left-hand corner. Whenever the fugitive chooses the safe bridge but the hunter waits at another, the fugitive gets safely across, yielding the payoff vector (1, 0). These two outcomes are shown in the second two cells of the top row. All of the other cells are marked, for now, with question marks. Why? The problem here is that if the fugitive crosses at either the rocky bridge or the cobra bridge, he introduces parametric factors into the game. In these cases, he takes on some risk of getting killed, and so producing the payoff vector (0, 1), that is independent of anything the hunter does. We don’t yet have enough concepts introduced to be able to show how to represent these outcomes in terms of utility functions—but by the time we’re finished we will, and this will provide the key to solving our puzzle from Section 1.

Matrix games are referred to as ‘normal-form’ or ‘strategic-form’ games, and games as trees are referred to as ‘extensive-form’ games. The two sorts of games are not equivalent, because extensive-form games contain information—about sequences of play and players’ levels of information about the game structure—that strategic-form games do not. In general, a strategic-form game could represent any one of several extensive-form games, so a strategic-form game is best thought of as being a set of extensive-form games. When order of play is irrelevant to a game’s outcome, then you should study its strategic form, since it’s the whole set you want to know about. Where order of play is relevant, the extensive form must be specified or your conclusions will be unreliable.

The distinctions described above are difficult to fully grasp if all one has to go on are abstract descriptions. They’re best illustrated by means of an example. For this purpose, we’ll use the most famous of all games: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It in fact gives the logic of the problem faced by Cortez’s and Henry V’s soldiers (see Section 1 above), and by Hobbes’s agents before they empower the tyrant. However, for reasons which will become clear a bit later, you should not take the PD as a typical game; it isn’t. We use it as an extended example here only because it’s particularly helpful for illustrating the relationship between strategic-form and extensive-form games (and later, for illustrating the relationships between one-shot and repeated games; see Section 4 below).

The name of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game is derived from the following situation typically used to exemplify it. Suppose that the police have arrested two people whom they know have committed an armed robbery together. Unfortunately, they lack enough admissible evidence to get a jury to convict. They do, however, have enough evidence to send each prisoner away for two years for theft of the getaway car. The chief inspector now makes the following offer to each prisoner: If you will confess to the robbery, implicating your partner, and she does not also confess, then you’ll go free and she’ll get ten years. If you both confess, you’ll each get 5 years. If neither of you confess, then you’ll each get two years for the auto theft.

Our first step in modeling the two prisoners’ situation as a game is to represent it in terms of utility functions. Following the usual convention, let us name the prisoners ‘Player I’ and ‘Player II’. Both Player I’s and Player II’s ordinal utility functions are identical:

Go free ≫ 4 2 years ≫ 3 5 years ≫ 2 10 years ≫ 0

The numbers in the function above are now used to express each player’s payoffs in the various outcomes possible in the situation. We can represent the problem faced by both of them on a single matrix that captures the way in which their separate choices interact; this is the strategic form of their game:

Figure 3

Each cell of the matrix gives the payoffs to both players for each combination of actions. Player I’s payoff appears as the first number of each pair, Player II’s as the second. So, if both players confess then they each get a payoff of 2 (5 years in prison each). This appears in the upper-left cell. If neither of them confess, they each get a payoff of 3 (2 years in prison each). This appears as the lower-right cell. If Player I confesses and Player II doesn’t then Player I gets a payoff of 4 (going free) and Player II gets a payoff of 0 (ten years in prison). This appears in the upper-right cell. The reverse situation, in which Player II confesses and Player I refuses, appears in the lower-left cell.

Each player evaluates his or her two possible actions here by comparing their personal payoffs in each column, since this shows you which of their actions is preferable, just to themselves, for each possible action by their partner. So, observe: If Player II confesses then Player I gets a payoff of 2 by confessing and a payoff of 0 by refusing. If Player II refuses, then Player I gets a payoff of 4 by confessing and a payoff of 3 by refusing. Therefore, Player I is better off confessing regardless of what Player II does. Player II, meanwhile, evaluates her actions by comparing her payoffs down each row, and she comes to exactly the same conclusion that Player I does. Wherever one action for a player is superior to her other actions for each possible action by the opponent, we say that the first action strictly dominates the second one. In the PD, then, confessing strictly dominates refusing for both players. Both players know this about each other, thus entirely eliminating any temptation to depart from the strictly dominated path. Thus both players will confess, and both will go to prison for 5 years.

The players, and analysts, can predict this outcome using a mechanical procedure, known as iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies. Player 1 can see by examining the matrix that his payoffs in each cell of the top row are higher than his payoffs in each corresponding cell of the bottom row. Therefore, it can never be utility-maximizing for him to play his bottom-row strategy, viz., refusing to confess, regardless of what Player II does. Since Player I’s bottom-row strategy will never be played, we can simply delete the bottom row from the matrix. Now it is obvious that Player II will not refuse to confess, since her payoff from confessing in the two cells that remain is higher than her payoff from refusing. So, once again, we can delete the one-cell column on the right from the game. We now have only one cell remaining, that corresponding to the outcome brought about by mutual confession. Since the reasoning that led us to delete all other possible outcomes depended at each step only on the premise that both players are economically rational — that is, will choose strategies that lead to higher payoffs over strategies that lead to lower ones—there are strong grounds for viewing joint confession as the solution to the game, the outcome on which its play must converge to the extent that economic rationality correctly models the behavior of the players. You should note that the order in which strictly dominated rows and columns are deleted doesn’t matter. Had we begun by deleting the right-hand column and then deleted the bottom row, we would have arrived at the same solution.

It’s been said a couple of times that the PD is not a typical game in many respects. One of these respects is that all its rows and columns are either strictly dominated or strictly dominant. In any strategic-form game where this is true, iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies is guaranteed to yield a unique solution. Later, however, we will see that for many games this condition does not apply, and then our analytic task is less straightforward.

The reader will probably have noticed something disturbing about the outcome of the PD. Had both players refused to confess, they’d have arrived at the lower-right outcome in which they each go to prison for only 2 years, thereby both earning higher utility than either receives when both confess. This is the most important fact about the PD, and its significance for game theory is quite general. We’ll therefore return to it below when we discuss equilibrium concepts in game theory. For now, however, let us stay with our use of this particular game to illustrate the difference between strategic and extensive forms.

When people introduce the PD into popular discussions, one will often hear them say that the police inspector must lock his prisoners into separate rooms so that they can’t communicate with one another. The reasoning behind this idea seems obvious: if the players could communicate, they’d surely see that they’re each better off if both refuse, and could make an agreement to do so, no? This, one presumes, would remove each player’s conviction that he or she must confess because they’ll otherwise be sold up the river by their partner. In fact, however, this intuition is misleading and its conclusion is false.

When we represent the PD as a strategic-form game, we implicitly assume that the prisoners can’t attempt collusive agreement since they choose their actions simultaneously. In this case, agreement before the fact can’t help. If Player I is convinced that his partner will stick to the bargain then he can seize the opportunity to go scot-free by confessing. Of course, he realizes that the same temptation will occur to Player II; but in that case he again wants to make sure he confesses, as this is his only means of avoiding his worst outcome. The prisoners’ agreement comes to naught because they have no way of enforcing it; their promises to each other constitute what game theorists call ‘cheap talk’.

But now suppose that the prisoners do not move simultaneously. That is, suppose that Player II can choose after observing Player I’s action. This is the sort of situation that people who think non-communication important must have in mind. Now Player II will be able to see that Player I has remained steadfast when it comes to her choice, and she need not be concerned about being suckered. However, this doesn’t change anything, a point that is best made by re-representing the game in extensive form. This gives us our opportunity to introduce game-trees and the method of analysis appropriate to them.

First, however, here are definitions of some concepts that will be helpful in analyzing game-trees:

Node: a point at which a player chooses an action. Initial node: the point at which the first action in the game occurs. Terminal node: any node which, if reached, ends the game. Each terminal node corresponds to an outcome. Subgame: any connected set of nodes and branches descending uniquely from one node. Payoff: an ordinal utility number assigned to a player at an outcome. Outcome: an assignment of a set of payoffs, one to each player in the game. Strategy: a program instructing a player which action to take at every node in the tree where she could possibly be called on to make a choice.

These quick definitions may not mean very much to you until you follow them being put to use in our analyses of trees below. It will probably be best if you scroll back and forth between them and the examples as we work through them. By the time you understand each example, you’ll find the concepts and their definitions natural and intuitive.

To make this exercise maximally instructive, let’s suppose that Players I and II have studied the matrix above and, seeing that they’re both better off in the outcome represented by the lower-right cell, have formed an agreement to cooperate. Player I is to commit to refusal first, after which Player II will reciprocate when the police ask for her choice. We will refer to a strategy of keeping the agreement as ‘cooperation’, and will denote it in the tree below with ‘C’. We will refer to a strategy of breaking the agreement as ‘defection’, and will denote it on the tree below with ‘D’. Each node is numbered 1, 2, 3, … , from top to bottom, for ease of reference in discussion. Here, then, is the tree:

Figure 4

Look first at each of the terminal nodes (those along the bottom). These represent possible outcomes. Each is identified with an assignment of payoffs, just as in the strategic-form game, with Player I’s payoff appearing first in each set and Player II’s appearing second. Each of the structures descending from the nodes 1, 2 and 3 respectively is a subgame. We begin our backward-induction analysis—using a technique called Zermelo’s algorithm—with the sub-games that arise last in the sequence of play. If the subgame descending from node 3 is played, then Player II will face a choice between a payoff of 4 and a payoff of 3. (Consult the second number, representing her payoff, in each set at a terminal node descending from node 3.) II earns her higher payoff by playing D. We may therefore replace the entire subgame with an assignment of the payoff (0,4) directly to node 3, since this is the outcome that will be realized if the game reaches that node. Now consider the subgame descending from node 2. Here, II faces a choice between a payoff of 2 and one of 0. She obtains her higher payoff, 2, by playing D. We may therefore assign the payoff (2,2) directly to node 2. Now we move to the subgame descending from node 1. (This subgame is, of course, identical to the whole game; all games are subgames of themselves.) Player I now faces a choice between outcomes (2,2) and (0,4). Consulting the first numbers in each of these sets, he sees that he gets his higher payoff—2—by playing D. D is, of course, the option of confessing. So Player I confesses, and then Player II also confesses, yielding the same outcome as in the strategic-form representation.

What has happened here intuitively is that Player I realizes that if he plays C (refuse to confess) at node 1, then Player II will be able to maximize her utility by suckering him and playing D. (On the tree, this happens at node 3.) This leaves Player I with a payoff of 0 (ten years in prison), which he can avoid only by playing D to begin with. He therefore defects from the agreement.

We have thus seen that in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the simultaneous and sequential versions yield the same outcome. This will often not be true of other games, however. Furthermore, only finite extensive-form (sequential) games of perfect information can be solved using Zermelo’s algorithm.

As noted earlier in this section, sometimes we must represent simultaneous moves within games that are otherwise sequential. (In all such cases the game as a whole will be one of imperfect information, so we won’t be able to solve it using Zermelo’s algorithm.) We represent such games using the device of information sets. Consider the following tree:

Figure 5

The oval drawn around nodes b and c indicates that they lie within a common information set. This means that at these nodes players cannot infer back up the path from whence they came; Player II does not know, in choosing her strategy, whether she is at b or c. (For this reason, what properly bear numbers in extensive-form games are information sets, conceived as ‘action points’, rather than nodes themselves; this is why the nodes inside the oval are labelled with letters rather than numbers.) Put another way, Player II, when choosing, does not know what Player I has done at node a. But you will recall from earlier in this section that this is just what defines two moves as simultaneous. We can thus see that the method of representing games as trees is entirely general. If no node after the initial node is alone in an information set on its tree, so that the game has only one subgame (itself), then the whole game is one of simultaneous play. If at least one node shares its information set with another, while others are alone, the game involves both simultaneous and sequential play, and so is still a game of imperfect information. Only if all information sets are inhabited by just one node do we have a game of perfect information.

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the outcome we’ve represented as (2,2), indicating mutual defection, was said to be the ‘solution’ to the game. Following the general practice in economics, game theorists refer to the solutions of games as equilibria. Philosophically minded readers will want to pose a conceptual question right here: What is ‘equilibrated’ about some game outcomes such that we are motivated to call them ‘solutions’? When we say that a physical system is in equilibrium, we mean that it is in a stable state, one in which all the causal forces internal to the system balance each other out and so leave it ‘at rest’ until and unless it is perturbed by the intervention of some exogenous (that is, ‘external’) force. This is what economists have traditionally meant in talking about ‘equilibria’; they read economic systems as being networks of mutually constraining (often causal) relations, just like physical systems, and the equilibria of such systems are then their endogenously stable states. (Note that, in both physical and economic systems, endogenously stable states might never be directly observed because the systems in question are never isolated from exogenous influences that move and destabilize them. In both classical mechanics and in economics, equilibrium concepts are tools for analysis, not predictions of what we expect to observe.) As we will see in later sections, it is possible to maintain this understanding of equilibria in the case of game theory. However, as we noted in Section 2.1, some people interpret game theory as being an explanatory theory of strategic reasoning. For them, a solution to a game must be an outcome that a rational agent would predict using the mechanisms of rational computation alone. Such theorists face some puzzles about solution concepts that are less important to the theorist who isn’t trying to use game theory to under-write a general analysis of rationality. The interest of philosophers in game theory is more often motivated by this ambition than is that of the economist or other scientist.

It’s useful to start the discussion here from the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma because it’s unusually simple from the perspective of the puzzles about solution concepts. What we referred to as its ‘solution’ is the unique Nash equilibrium of the game. (The ‘Nash’ here refers to John Nash, the Nobel Laureate mathematician who in Nash (1950) did most to extend and generalize von Neumann & Morgenstern’s pioneering work.) Nash equilibrium (henceforth ‘NE’) applies (or fails to apply, as the case may be) to whole sets of strategies, one for each player in a game. A set of strategies is a NE just in case no player could improve her payoff, given the strategies of all other players in the game, by changing her strategy. Notice how closely this idea is related to the idea of strict dominance: no strategy could be a NE strategy if it is strictly dominated. Therefore, if iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies takes us to a unique outcome, we know that the vector of strategies that leads to it is the game’s unique NE. Now, almost all theorists agree that avoidance of strictly dominated strategies is a minimum requirement of economic rationality. A player who knowingly chooses a strictly dominated strategy directly violates clause (iii) of the definition of economic agency as given in Section 2.2. This implies that if a game has an outcome that is a unique NE, as in the case of joint confession in the PD, that must be its unique solution. This is one of the most important respects in which the PD is an ‘easy’ (and atypical) game.

We can specify one class of games in which NE is always not only necessary but sufficient as a solution concept. These are finite perfect-information games that are also zero-sum. A zero-sum game (in the case of a game involving just two players) is one in which one player can only be made better off by making the other player worse off. (Tic-tac-toe is a simple example of such a game: any move that brings one player closer to winning brings her opponent closer to losing, and vice-versa.) We can determine whether a game is zero-sum by examining players’ utility functions: in zero-sum games these will be mirror-images of each other, with one player’s highly ranked outcomes being low-ranked for the other and vice-versa. In such a game, if I am playing a strategy such that, given your strategy, I can’t do any better, and if you are also playing such a strategy, then, since any change of strategy by me would have to make you worse off and vice-versa, it follows that our game can have no solution compatible with our mutual economic rationality other than its unique NE. We can put this another way: in a zero-sum game, my playing a strategy that maximizes my minimum payoff if you play the best you can, and your simultaneously doing the same thing, is just equivalent to our both playing our best strategies, so this pair of so-called ‘maximin’ procedures is guaranteed to find the unique solution to the game, which is its unique NE. (In tic-tac-toe, this is a draw. You can’t do any better than drawing, and neither can I, if both of us are trying to win and trying not to lose.)

However, most games do not have this property. It won’t be possible, in this one article, to enumerate all of the ways in which games can be problematic from the perspective of their possible solutions. (For one thing, it is highly unlikely that theorists have yet discovered all of the possible problems.) However, we can try to generalize the issues a bit.

First, there is the problem that in most non-zero-sum games, there is more than one NE, but not all NE look equally plausible as the solutions upon which strategically alert players would hit. Consider the strategic-form game below (taken from Kreps (1990), p. 403):

Figure 6

This game has two NE: s1-t1 and s2-t2. (Note that no rows or columns are strictly dominated here. But if Player I is playing s1 then Player II can do no better than t1, and vice-versa; and similarly for the s2-t2 pair.) If NE is our only solution concept, then we shall be forced to say that either of these outcomes is equally persuasive as a solution. However, if game theory is regarded as an explanatory and/or normative theory of strategic reasoning, this seems to be leaving something out: surely sensible players with perfect information would converge on s1-t1? (Note that this is not like the situation in the PD, where the socially superior situation is unachievable because it is not a NE. In the case of the game above, both players have every reason to try to converge on the NE in which they are better off.)

This illustrates the fact that NE is a relatively (logically) weak solution concept, often failing to predict intuitively sensible solutions because, if applied alone, it refuses to allow players to use principles of equilibrium selection that, if not demanded by economic rationality—or a more ambitious philosopher’s concept of rationality—at least seem both sensible and computationally accessible. Consider another example from Kreps (1990), p. 397:

Figure 7

Here, no strategy strictly dominates another. However, Player I’s top row, s1, weakly dominates s2, since I does at least as well using s1 as s2 for any reply by Player II, and on one reply by II (t2), I does better. So should not the players (and the analyst) delete the weakly dominated row s2? When they do so, column t1 is then strictly dominated, and the NE s1-t2 is selected as the unique solution. However, as Kreps goes on to show using this example, the idea that weakly dominated strategies should be deleted just like strict ones has odd consequences. Suppose we change the payoffs of the game just a bit, as follows:

Figure 8

s2 is still weakly dominated as before; but of our two NE, s2-t1 is now the most attractive for both players; so why should the analyst eliminate its possibility? (Note that this game, again, does not replicate the logic of the PD. There, it makes sense to eliminate the most attractive outcome, joint refusal to confess, because both players have incentives to unilaterally deviate from it, so it is not an NE. This is not true of s2-t1 in the present game. You should be starting to clearly see why we called the PD game ‘atypical’.) The argument for eliminating weakly dominated strategies is that Player 1 may be nervous, fearing that Player II is not completely sure to be economically rational (or that Player II fears that Player I isn’t completely reliably economically rational, or that Player II fears that Player I fears that Player II isn’t completely reliably economically rational, and so on ad infinitum) and so might play t2 with some positive probability. If the possibility of departures from reliable economic rationality is taken seriously, then we have an argument for eliminating weakly dominated strategies: Player I thereby insures herself against her worst outcome, s2-t2. Of course, she pays a cost for this insurance, reducing her expected payoff from 10 to 5. On the other hand, we might imagine that the players could communicate before playing the game and agree to play correlated strategies so as to coordinate on s2-t1, thereby removing some, most or all of the uncertainty that encourages elimination of the weakly dominated row s1, and eliminating s1-t2 as a viable solution instead!

Any proposed principle for solving games that may have the effect of eliminating one or more NE from consideration as solutions is referred to as a refinement of NE. In the case just discussed, elimination of weakly dominated strategies is one possible refinement, since it refines away the NE s2-t1, and correlation is another, since it refines away the other NE, s1-t2, instead. So which refinement is more appropriate as a solution concept? People who think of game theory as an explanatory and/or normative theory of strategic rationality have generated a substantial literature in which the merits and drawbacks of a large number of refinements are debated. In principle, there seems to be no limit on the number of refinements that could be considered, since there may also be no limits on the set of philosophical intuitions about what principles a rational agent might or might not see fit to follow or to fear or hope that other players are following.

We now digress briefly to make a point about terminology. Theorists who adopt the revealed preference interpretation of the utility functions in game theory are sometimes referred to in the philosophy of economics literature as ‘behaviorists’. This reflects the fact the revealed preference approaches equate choices with economically consistent actions, rather than being intended to refer to mental constructs. Historically, there was a relationship of comfortable alignment, though not direct theoretical co-construction, between revealed preference in economics and the methodological and ontological behaviorism that dominated scientific psychology during the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, this usage is increasingly likely to cause confusion due to the more recent rise of behavioral game theory (Camerer 2003). This program of research aims to directly incorporate into game-theoretic models generalizations, derived mainly from experiments with people, about ways in which people differ from purer economic agents in the inferences they draw from information (‘framing’). Applications also typically incorporate special assumptions about utility functions, also derived from experiments. For example, players may be taken to be willing to make trade-offs between the magnitudes of their own payoffs and inequalities in the distribution of payoffs among the players. We will turn to some discussion of behavioral game theory in Section 8.1, Section 8.2 and Section 8.3. For the moment, note that this use of game theory crucially rests on assumptions about psychological representations of value thought to be common among people. Thus it would be misleading to refer to behavioral game theory as ‘behaviorist’. But then it just would invite confusion to continue referring to conventional economic game theory that relies on revealed preference as ‘behaviorist’ game theory. We will therefore refer to it as ‘non-psychological’ game theory. We mean by this the kind of game theory used by most economists who are not revisionist behavioral economists. (We use the qualifier ‘revisionist’ to reflect the further complication that increasingly many economists who apply revealed preference concepts conduct experiments, and some of them call themselves ‘behavioral economists’! For a proposed new set of conventions to reduce this labeling chaos, see Ross (2014), pp. 200–201.) These ‘establishment’ economists treat game theory as the abstract mathematics of strategic interaction, rather than as an attempt to directly characterize special psychological dispositions that might be typical in humans.

Non-psychological game theorists tend to take a dim view of much of the refinement program. This is for the obvious reason that it relies on intuitions about which kinds of inferences people should find sensible. Like most scientists, non-psychological game theorists are suspicious of the force and basis of philosophical assumptions as guides to empirical and mathematical modeling.

Behavioral game theory, by contrast, can be understood as a refinement of game theory, though not necessarily of its solution concepts, in a different sense. It restricts the theory’s underlying axioms for application to a special class of agents, individual, psychologically typical humans. It motivates this restriction by reference to inferences, along with preferences, that people do find natural, regardless of whether these seem rational, which they frequently do not. Non-psychological and behavioral game theory have in common that neither is intended to be normative—though both are often used to try to describe norms that prevail in groups of players, as well to explain why norms might persist in groups of players even when they appear to be less than fully rational to philosophical intuitions. Both see the job of applied game theory as being to predict outcomes of empirical games given some distribution of strategic dispositions, and some distribution of expectations about the strategic dispositions of others, that are shaped by dynamics in players’ environments, including institutional pressures and structures and evolutionary selection. Let us therefore group non-psychological and behavioral game theorists together, just for purposes of contrast with normative game theorists, as descriptive game theorists.

Descriptive game theorists are often inclined to doubt that the goal of seeking a general theory of rationality makes sense as a project. Institutions and evolutionary processes build many environments, and what counts as rational procedure in one environment may not be favoured in another. On the other hand, an entity that does not at least stochastically (i.e., perhaps noisily but statistically more often than not) satisfy the minimal restrictions of economic rationality cannot, except by accident, be accurately characterized as aiming to maximize a utility function. To such entities game theory has no application in the first place.

This does not imply that non-psychological game theorists abjure all principled ways of restricting sets of NE to subsets based on their relative probabilities of arising. In particular, non-psychological game theorists tend to be sympathetic to approaches that shift emphasis from rationality onto considerations of the informational dynamics of games. We should perhaps not be surprised that NE analysis alone often fails to tell us much of applied, empirical interest about strategic-form games (e.g., Figure 6 above), in which informational structure is suppressed. Equilibrium selection issues are often more fruitfully addressed in the context of extensive-form games.

In order to deepen our understanding of extensive-form games, we need an example with more interesting structure than the PD offers.

Consider the game described by this tree:

Figure 9

This game is not intended to fit any preconceived situation; it is simply a mathematical object in search of an application. (L and R here just denote ‘left’ and ‘right’ respectively.)

Now consider the strategic form of this game:

Figure 10

If you are confused by this, remember that a strategy must tell a player what to do at every information set where that player has an action. Since each player chooses between two actions at each of two information sets here, each player has four strategies in total. The first letter in each strategy designation tells each player what to do if he or she reaches their first information set, the second what to do if their second information set is reached. I.e., LR for Player II tells II to play L if information set 5 is reached and R if information set 6 is reached.

If you examine the matrix in Figure 10, you will discover that (LL, RL) is among the NE. This is a bit puzzling, since if Player I reaches her second information set (7) in the extensive-form game, she would hardly wish to play L there; she earns a higher payoff by playing R at node 7. Mere NE analysis doesn’t notice this because NE is insensitive to what happens off the path of play. Player I, in choosing L at node 4, ensures that node 7 will not be reached; this is what is meant by saying that it is ‘off the path of play’. In analyzing extensive-form games, however, we should care what happens off the path of play, because consideration of this is crucial to what happens on the path. For example, it is the fact that Player I would play R if node 7 were reached that would cause Player II to play L if node 6 were reached, and this is why Player I won’t choose R at node 4. We are throwing away information relevant to game solutions if we ignore off-path outcomes, as mere NE analysis does. Notice that this reason for doubting that NE is a wholly satisfactory equilibrium concept in itself has nothing to do with intuitions about rationality, as in the case of the refinement concepts discussed in Section 2.5.

Now apply Zermelo’s algorithm to the extensive form of our current example. Begin, again, with the last subgame, that descending from node 7. This is Player I’s move, and she would choose R because she prefers her payoff of 5 to the payoff of 4 she gets by playing L. Therefore, we assign the payoff (5, −1) to node 7. Thus at node 6 II faces a choice between (−1, 0) and (5, −1). He chooses L. At node 5 II chooses R. At node 4 I is thus choosing between (0, 5) and (−1, 0), and so plays L. Note that, as in the PD, an outcome appears at a terminal node—(4, 5) from node 7—that is Pareto superior to the NE. Again, however, the dynamics of the game prevent it from being reached.

The fact that Zermelo’s algorithm picks out the strategy vector (LR, RL) as the unique solution to the game shows that it’s yielding something other than just an NE. In fact, it is generating the game’s subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE). It gives an outcome that yields a NE not just in the whole game but in every subgame as well. This is a persuasive solution concept because, again unlike the refinements of Section 2.5, it does not demand ‘extra’ rationality of agents in the sense of expecting them to have and use philosophical intuitions about ‘what makes sense’. It does, however, assume that players not only know everything strategically relevant to their situation but also use all of that information. In arguments about the foundations of economics, this is often referred to as an aspect of rationality, as in the phrase ‘rational expectations’. But, as noted earlier, it is best to be careful not to confuse the general normative idea of rationality with computational power and the possession of budgets, in time and energy, to make the most of it.

An agent playing a subgame perfect strategy simply chooses, at every node she reaches, the path that brings her the highest payoff in the subgame emanating from that node. SPE predicts a game’s outcome just in case, in solving the game, the players foresee that they will all do that.

A main value of analyzing extensive-form games for SPE is that this can help us to locate structural barriers to social optimization. In our current example, Player I would be better off, and Player II no worse off, at the left-hand node emanating from node 7 than at the SPE outcome. But Player I’s economic rationality, and Player II’s awareness of this, blocks the socially efficient outcome. If our players wish to bring about the more socially efficient outcome (4,5) here, they must do so by redesigning their institutions so as to change the structure of the game. The enterprise of changing institutional and informational structures so as to make efficient outcomes more likely in the games that agents (that is, people, corporations, governments, etc.) actually play is known as mechanism design, and is one of the leading areas of application of game theory. The main techniques are reviewed in Hurwicz and Reiter (2006), the first author of which was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in the area.

Many readers, but especially philosophers, might wonder why, in the case of the example taken up in the previous section, mechanism design should be necessary unless players are morbidly selfish sociopaths. Surely, the players might be able to just see that outcome (4,5) is socially and morally superior; and since the whole problem also takes for granted that they can also see the path of actions that leads to this efficient outcome, who is the game theorist to announce that, unless their game is changed, it’s unattainable? This objection, which applies the distinctive idea of rationality urged by Immanuel Kant, indicates the leading way in which many philosophers mean more by ‘rationality’ than descriptive game theorists do. This theme is explored with great liveliness and polemical force in Binmore (1994, 1998).

This weighty philosophical controversy about rationality is sometimes confused by misinterpretation of the meaning of ‘utility’ in non-psychological game theory. To root out this mistake, consider the Prisoner’s Dilemma again. We have seen that in the unique NE of the PD, both players get less utility than they could have through mutual cooperation. This may strike you, even if you are not a Kantian (as it has struck many commentators) as perverse. Surely, you may think, it simply results from a combination of selfishness and paranoia on the part of the players. To begin with they have no regard for the social good, and then they shoot themselves in the feet by being too untrustworthy to respect agreements.

This way of thinking is very common in popular discussions, and badly mixed up. To dispel its influence, let us first introduce some terminology for talking about outcomes. Welfare economists typically measure social good in terms of Pareto efficiency. A distribution of utility β is said to be Pareto superior over another distribution δ just in case from state δ there is a possible redistribution of utility to β such that at least one player is better off in β than in δ and no player is worse off. Failure to move from a Pareto-inferior to a Pareto-superior distribution is inefficient because the existence of β as a possibility, at least in principle, shows that in δ some utility is being wasted. Now, the outcome (3,3) that represents mutual cooperation in our model of the PD is clearly Pareto superior to mutual defection; at (3,3) both players are better off than at (2,2). So it is true that PDs lead to inefficient outcomes. This was true of our example in Section 2.6 as well.

However, inefficiency should not be associated with immorality. A utility function for a player is supposed to represent everything that player cares about, which may be anything at all. As we have described the situation of our prisoners they do indeed care only about their own relative prison sentences, but there is nothing essential in this. What makes a game an instance of the PD is strictly and only its payoff structure. Thus we could have two Mother Theresa types here, both of whom care little for themselves and wish only to feed starving children. But suppose the original Mother Theresa wishes to feed the children of Calcutta while Mother Juanita wishes to feed the children of Bogota. And suppose that the international aid agency will maximize its donation if the two saints nominate the same city, will give the second-highest amount if they nominate each others’ cities, and the lowest amount if they each nominate their own city. Our saints are in a PD here, though hardly selfish or unconcerned with the social good.

To return to our prisoners, suppose that, contrary to our assumptions, they do value each other’s well-being as well as their own. In that case, this must be reflected in their utility functions, and hence in their payoffs. If their payoff structures are changed so that, for example, they would feel so badly about contributing to inefficiency that they’d rather spend extra years in prison than endure the shame, then they will no longer be in a PD. But all this shows is that not every possible situation is a PD; it does not show that selfishness is among the assumptions of game theory. It is the logic of the prisoners’ situation, not their psychology, that traps them in the inefficient outcome, and if that really is their situation then they are stuck in it (barring further complications to be discussed below). Agents who wish to avoid inefficient outcomes are best advised to prevent certain games from arising; the defender of the possibility of Kantian rationality is really proposing that they try to dig themselves out of such games by turning themselves into different kinds of agents.

In general, then, a game is partly defined by the payoffs assigned to the players. In any application, such assignments should be based on sound empirical evidence. If a proposed solution involves tacitly changing these payoffs, then this ‘solution’ is in fact a disguised way of changing the subject and evading the implications of best modeling practice.

Our last point above opens the way to a philosophical puzzle, one of several that still preoccupy those concerned with the logical foundations of game theory. It can be raised with respect to any number of examples, but we will borrow an elegant one from C. Bicchieri (1993). Consider the following game:

Figure 11

The NE outcome here is at the single leftmost node descending from node 8. To see this, backward induct again. At node 10, I would play L for a payoff of 3, giving II a payoff of 1. II can do better than this by playing L at node 9, giving I a payoff of 0. I can do better than this by playing L at node 8; so that is what I does, and the game terminates without II getting to move. A puzzle is then raised by Bicchieri (along with other authors, including Binmore (1987) and Pettit and Sugden (1989)) by way of the following reasoning. Player I plays L at node 8 because she knows that Player II is economically rational, and so would, at node 9, play L because Player II knows that Player I is economically rational and so would, at node 10, play L. But now we have the following paradox: Player I must suppose that Player II, at node 9, would predict Player I’s economically rational play at node 10 despite having arrived at a node (9) that could only be reached if Player I is not economically rational! If Player I is not economically rational then Player II is not justified in predicting that Player I will not play R at node 10, in which case it is not clear that Player II shouldn’t play R at 9; and if Player II plays R at 9, then Player I is guaranteed of a better payoff then she gets if she plays L at node 8. Both players use backward induction to solve the game; backward induction requires that Player I know that Player II knows that Player I is economically rational; but Player II can solve the game only by using a backward induction argument that takes as a premise the failure of Player I to behave in accordance with economic rationality. This is the paradox of backward induction.

A standard way around this paradox in the literature is to invoke the so-called ‘trembling hand’ due to Selten (1975). The idea here is that a decision and its consequent act may ‘come apart’ with some nonzero probability, however small. That is, a player might intend to take an action but then slip up in the execution and send the game down some other path instead. If there is even a remote possibility that a player may make a mistake—that her ‘hand may tremble’—then no contradiction is introduced by a player’s using a backward induction argument that requires the hypothetical assumption that another player has taken a path that an economically rational player could not choose. In our example, Player II could reason about what to do at node 9 conditional on the assumption that Player I chose L at node 8 but then slipped.

Gintis (2009a) points out that the apparent paradox does not arise merely from our supposing that both players are economically rational. It rests crucially on the additional premise that each player must know, and reasons on the basis of knowing, that the other player is economically rational. This is the premise with which each player’s conjectures about what would happen off the equilibrium path of play are inconsistent. A player has reason to consider out-of-equilibrium possibilities if she either believes that her opponent is economically rational but his hand may tremble or she attaches some nonzero probability to the possibility that he is not economically rational or she attaches some doubt to her conjecture about his utility function. As Gintis also stresses, this issue with solving extensive-form games games for SEP by Zermelo’s algorithm generalizes: a player has no reason to play even a Nash equilibrium strategy unless she expects other players to also play Nash equilibrium strategies. We will return to this issue in Section 7 below.

The paradox of backward induction, like the puzzles raised by equilibrium refinement, is mainly a problem for those who view game theory as contributing to a normative theory of rationality (specifically, as contributing to that larger theory the theory of strategic rationality). The non-psychological game theorist can give a different sort of account of apparently “irrational” play and the prudence it encourages. This involves appeal to the empirical fact that actual agents, including people, must learn the equilibrium strategies of games they play, at least whenever the games are at all complicated. Research shows that even a game as simple as the Prisoner’s Dilemma requires learning by people (Ledyard 1995, Sally 1995, Camerer 2003, p. 265). What it means to say that people must learn equilibrium strategies is that we must be a bit more sophisticated than was indicated earlier in constructing utility functions from behavior in application of Revealed Preference Theory. Instead of constructing utility functions on the basis of single episodes, we must do so on the basis of observed runs of behavior once it has stabilized, signifying maturity of learning for the subjects in question and the game in question. Once again, the Prisoner’s Dilemma makes a good example. People encounter few one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemmas in everyday life, but they encounter many repeated PD’s with non-strangers. As a result, when set into what is intended to be a one-shot PD in the experimental laboratory, people tend to initially play as if the game were a single round of a repeated PD. The repeated PD has many Nash equilibria that involve cooperation rather than defection. Thus experimental subjects tend to cooperate at first in these circumstances, but learn after some number of rounds to defect. The experimenter cannot infer that she has successfully induced a one-shot PD with her experimental setup until she sees this behavior stabilize.

If players of games realize that other players may need to learn game structures and equilibria from experience, this gives them reason to take account of what happens off the equilibrium paths of extensive-form games. Of course, if a player fears that other players have not learned equilibrium, this may well remove her incentive to play an equilibrium strategy herself. This raises a set of deep problems about social learning (Fudenberg and Levine 1998. How can ignorant players learn to play equilibria if sophisticated players don’t show them, because the sophisticated are not incentivized to play equilibrium strategies until the ignorant have learned? The crucial answer in the case of applications of game theory to interactions among people is that young people are socialized by growing up in networks of institutions, including cultural norms. Most complex games that people play are already in progress among people who were socialized before them—that is, have learned game structures and equilibria (Ross 2008a). Novices must then only copy those whose play appears to be expected and understood by others. Institutions and norms are rich with reminders, including homilies and easily remembered rules of thumb, to help people remember what they are doing (Clark 1997).

As noted in Section 2.7 above, when observed behavior does not stabilize around equilibria in a game, and there is no evidence that learning is still in process, the analyst should infer that she has incorrectly modeled the situation she is studying. Chances are that she has either mis-specified players’ utility functions, the strategies available to the players, or the information that is available to them. Given the complexity of many of the situations that social scientists study, we should not be surprised that mis-specification of models happens frequently. Applied game theorists must do lots of learning, just like their subjects.

The paradox of backward induction is one of a family of paradoxes that arise if one builds possession and use of literally complete information into a concept of rationality. (Consider, by analogy, the stock market paradox that arises if we suppose that economically rational investment incorporates literally rational expectations: assume that no individual investor can beat the market in the long run because the market always knows everything the investor knows; then no one has incentive to gather knowledge about asset values; then no one will ever gather any such information and so from the assumption that the market knows everything it follows that the market cannot know anything!)As we will see in detail in various discussions below, most applications of game theory explicitly incorporate uncertainty and prospects for learning by players. The extensive-form games with SPE that we looked at above are really conceptual tools to help us prepare concepts for application to situations where complete and perfect information is unusual. We cannot avoid the paradox if we think, as some philosophers and normative game theorists do, that one of the conceptual tools we want to use game theory to sharpen is a fully general idea of rationality itself. But this is not a concern entertained by economists and other scientists who put game theory to use in empirical modeling. In real cases, unless players have experienced play at equilibrium with one another in the past, even if they are all economically rational and all believe this about one another, we should predict that they will attach some positive probability to the conjecture that understanding of game structures among some players is imperfect. This then explains why people, even if they are economically rational agents, may often, or even usually, play as if they believe in trembling hands.

Learning of equilibria may take various forms for different agents and for games of differing levels of complexity and risk. Incorporating it into game-theoretic models of interactions thus introduces an extensive new set of technicalities. For the most fully developed general theory, the reader is referred to Fudenberg and Levine (1998); the same authors provide a non-technical overview of the issues in Fudenberg and Levine (2016)). A first important distinction is between learning specific parameters between rounds of a repeated game (see Section 4) with common players, and learning about general strategic expectations across different games. The latter can include learning about players if the learner is updating expectations based on her models of types of players she recurrently encounters. Then we can distinguish between passive learning, in which a player merely updates her subjective priors based on her observation of moves and outcomes, and strategic choices she infers from these, and active learning, in which she probes—in technical language screens—for information about other players’ strategies by choosing strategies that test her conjectures about what will occur off what she believes to be the game’s equilibrium path. A major difficulty for both players and modelers is that screening moves might be misinterpreted if players are also incentivized to make moves to signal information to one another (see Section 4). In other words: trying to learn about strategies can under some circumstances interfere with players’ abilities to learn equilibria. Finally, the discussion so far has assumed that all possible learning in a game is about the structure of the game itself. Wilcox (2008) shows that if players are learning new information about causal processes occurring outside a game while simultaneously trying to update expectations about other players’ strategies, the modeler can find herself reaching beyond the current limits of technical knowledge.

It was said above that people might usually play as if they believe in trembling hands. A very general reason for this is that when people interact, the world does not furnish them with cue-cards advising them about the structures of the games they’re playing. They must make and test conjectures about this from their social contexts. Sometimes, contexts are fixed by institutional rules. For example, when a person walks into a retail shop and sees a price tag on something she’d like to have, she knows without needing to conjecture or learn anything that she’s involved in a simple ‘take it or leave it’ game. In other markets, she might know she is expect to haggle, and know the rules for that too.

Given the unresolved complex relationship between learning theory and game theory, the reasoning above might seem to imply that game theory can never be applied to situations involving human players that are novel for them. Fortunately, however, we face no such impasse. In a pair of influential papers in the mid-to-late 1990s, McKelvey and Palfrey (1995, 1998) developed the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE). QRE is not a refinement of NE, in the sense of being a philosophically motivated effort to strengthen NE by reference to normative standards of rationality. It is, rather, a method for calculating the equilibrium properties of choices made by players whose conjectures about possible errors in the choices of other players are uncertain. QRE is