The cutting power of preparation

Olivier Tercieux and Mark Voorneveld

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, 2010, vol. 71, issue 1, 85-101

Abstract: In a strategic game, a curb set (Basu and Weibull, Econ Lett 36:141–146, 1991) is a product set of pure strategies containing all best responses to every possible belief restricted to this set. Prep sets (Voorneveld, Games Econ Behav 48:403–414, 2004) relax this condition by only requiring the presence of at least one best response to such a belief. The purpose of this paper is to provide sufficient conditions under which minimal prep sets give sharp predictions. These conditions are satisfied in many economically relevant classes of games, including supermodular games, potential games, and congestion games with player-specific payoffs. In these classes, minimal curb sets generically have a large cutting power as well, although it is shown that there are relevant subclasses of coordination games and congestion games where minimal curb sets have no cutting power at all and simply consist of the entire strategy space. Copyright The Author(s) 2010

Keywords: Curb sets; Prep sets; Supermodular games; Potential games; Congestion games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00186-009-0286-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The cutting power of preparation (2010)
Working Paper: The cutting power of preparation (2005)
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:spr:mathme:v:71:y:2010:i:1:p:85-101

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/00186

DOI: 10.1007/s00186-009-0286-5

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research is currently edited by Oliver Stein

More articles in Mathematical Methods of Operations Research from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR), Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().