Robustness to Strategic Uncertainty

Ola Andersson, Cédric Argenton and Jörgen W. Weibull

No 910, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: In games with continuum strategy sets, we model a player’s uncertainty about another player’s strategy, as an atomless probability distribution over the other player’s strategy set. We call a strategy profile (strictly) robust to strategic uncertainty if it is the limit, as uncertainty vanishes, of some sequence (all sequences) of strategy profiles in which every player’s strategy is optimal under his or her uncertainty about the others. General properties of this robustness criterion are derived and it is shown that it is a refinement of Nash equilibrium when payoff functions are continuous. We apply the criterion to a class of Bertrand competition games. These are discontinuous games that admit a continuum of Nash equilibria. Our robustness criterion selects a unique Nash equilibrium, and this selection agrees with recent experimental findings.

Keywords: Nash equilibrium; Refinement; Strategic uncertainty; Bertrand competition; Log-concavity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D43 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-upt
Date: 2012-03-30
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0910

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