Note that the final plot device where one player does not know the rules of the game has not been encompassed by standard game theory.
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February 15, 2012 at 9:37 am
Dan Hirschman
It seems that Wesley’s actual strategy – change the rules in a way that the other player can’t detect until it’s too late – is both pervasive in real conflicts and hard to model. Thomas Schelling discusses this problem at length in “Strategy of Conflict”, I think, and for that reason always seemed more skeptical to the intense modeling efforts on the actual game forms themselves. All the interesting stuff is what happens leading up to the game – the deceit, trickery, maneuvering, establishing or severing of communication lines, etc. What happened to push game theory down the extreme modeling approach?
February 15, 2012 at 10:21 am
Brad L
This reminds me of the following two papers:
1. Crawford, V. P. (2003). Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of Intentions. The American Economic Review, 93(1), 133–149. doi:10.2307/3132165
Here deception can work with non-equilibrium K-Level thinkers, and foil people who think one level too far.
2. Foster, D. P., & Young, H. P. (2001). On the impossibility of predicting the behavior of rational agents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(22), 12848–12853. doi:10.1073/pnas.211534898
Agents in a rock paper scissors game without knowledge of each other’s payoffs eventually form far from equilibrium conjectures about what the other will do.
February 17, 2012 at 10:54 am
Kevin Hutch
It’s funny, I always describe game theory to laymen as the mathematical formalization of this scene.