The possibility of impossible stairways and greener grass

Mark Voorneveld

No 673, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: In classical game theory, players have finitely many actions and evaluate outcomes of mixed strategies using a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function. Allowing a larger, but countable, player set introduces a host of phenomena that are impossible in finite games.

Firstly, in coordination games, all players have the same preferences: switching to a weakly dominant action makes everyone at least as well off as before. Nevertheless, there are coordination games where the best outcome occurs if everyone chooses a weakly dominated action, while the worst outcome occurs if everyone chooses the weakly dominant action.

Secondly, the location of payoff-dominant equilibria behaves capriciously: two coordination games that look so much alike that even the consequences of unilateral deviations are the same may nevertheless have disjoint sets of payoff-dominant equilibria.

Thirdly, a large class of games has no (pure or mixed) Nash equilibria. Following the proverb ``the grass is always greener on the other side of the hedge'', greener-grass games model constant discontent: in one part of the strategy space, players would rather switch to its complement. Once there, they'd rather switch back.

Keywords: coordination games; dominant strategies; payoff-dominance; nonexistence of equilibrium; tail events (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2007-08-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
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Related works:
Working Paper: The Possibility of Impossible Stairways and Greener Grass (2007)
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