 Minimal belief revision leads to backward inductionAndrés Perea () Mathematical Social Sciences, 2008, vol. 56, issue 1, 1-26 Abstract: We present an epistemic model for games with perfect information in which players, upon observing an unexpected move, may revise their belief about the opponents' preferences over outcomes. For a given profile P of preference relations over outcomes, we impose the following conditions: (1) players initially believe that opponents have preference relations as specified by P; (2) players believe at every instance of the game that each opponent is carrying out a sequentially rational strategy; (3) if a player revises his belief about an opponent's type, he must search for a "new" type that disagrees with the "old" type on a minimal number of statements about this opponent; (4) if a player revises his belief about an opponent's preference relation over outcomes, he must search for a "new" preference relation that disagrees with the "old" preference relation on a minimal number of pairwise rankings. It is shown that every player whose preference relation is given by P, and who throughout the game respects common belief in the events (1)-(4), has a unique sequentially rational strategy, namely his backward induction strategy in the game induced by P. Date: 2008 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:56:y:2008:i:1:p:1-26 Access Statistics for this article Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier |
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