Sleeping Newcomb

John W. E. Cremin
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John W. E. Cremin: Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France

No 2611, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: I study games with self-locating uncertainty in which an agent at a single information set is uncertain of his position evenwithina given information set of a given play of the game. In such games, there is an analogy to be drawn with Newcomb’s problem: in bothsettings, locally rational (thirder) reasoning and globally optimal (planning) reasoning can prescribe different strategies. I call this aNewcomb tension, and present a representation theorem: a Bayesian with commitment power and an uncommitted agent holding incorrect ‘one-boxer’ beliefs are behaviourally equivalent. In the single-agent case, randomisation always resolves the tension but in multi-agent games, in which planning and interim social weights diverge under some conditions, a multi-agent Newcomb tension can survive this randomisation resolution with an asymmetric awakening structure across agents. I consider the implications of this for the duplicating Sleeping Beauty problem, and a duplicating variant of the absent-minded driver.

Keywords: Sleeping Beauty Problem; Newcomb’s Problem; Self-Locating/Indexical Uncertainty; Imperfect Recall; Absent-Minded Driver (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D71 D81 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-04
Note: Working paper AMSE 2026-11
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