Categorizing others in a large game

Yaron Azrieli

Games and Economic Behavior, 2009, vol. 67, issue 2, 351-362

Abstract: We study the efficiency of categorization of other agents as a way of saving cognitive resources in the settings of a large normal-form game. We assume that, when an agent categorizes (partitions) her opponents, she only has information about the average strategy in each category. A strategy profile is a conjectural categorical equilibrium (CCE) with respect to a given categorization profile if every player's strategy is a best response to some consistent conjecture about the strategies of her opponents. It is shown that, for a wide family of games and for a particular categorization profile, every CCE is an approximate Nash equilibrium when the number of players is large. This result demonstrates the potential of categorization as an efficient way to store information in complex environments. Although possessing a coarse description of their opponents' strategies, agents behave as if they see the full picture.

Keywords: Categorization; Large; games; Conjectural; equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899-8256(09)00011-6
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:67:y:2009:i:2:p:351-362

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 ().