Dominance rationality: A unified approach

John Hillas and Dov Samet

Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, vol. 119, issue C, 189-196

Abstract: There are four types of dominance depending on whether domination is strict or weak and whether the dominating strategy is pure or mixed. Letting d vary over these four types of dominance, we say that a player is d-dominance rational when she does not play a strategy that is d-dominated relative to what she knows. For weak dominance by a mixed strategy, Stalnaker (1994) introduced a process of iterative maximal elimination of certain profiles that we call here flaws. We define here, analogously, d-flaws for each type of dominance d, and show that for each d, iterative elimination of d-flaws is order independent. We then show that the characterization of common knowledge of d-dominance rationality is the same for each d. A strategy profile can be played when d-dominance rationality is commonly known if and only if it survives an iterative elimination of d-flaws.

Keywords: Dominance rationality; Strict dominance; Weak dominance; Order independence; Flaws; Common knowledge of rationality; Iterative elimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825619301666
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:119:y:2020:i:c:p:189-196

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().