Working Paper

Strict Incentives and Strategic Uncertainty

Hans Carlsson, Philipp Christoph Wichardt
CESifo, Munich, 2019

CESifo Working Paper No. 7715

This paper proposes a comprehensive perspective on the question of self-enforcing solutions for normal form games. While this question has been widely discussed in the literature, the focus is usually either on strict incentives for players to stay within the proposed solution or on strategic uncertainty, i.e. robustness to trembles. The present approach combines both requirements in proposing the concept of robust sets, i.e. sets of strategy profiles which satisfy both strict incentives and robustness to strategic uncertainty. The result is a set valued solution, a variant of which is shown to exist for all finite normal form games.

CESifo Category
Empirical and Theoretical Methods
Behavioural Economics
Keywords: game theory, self-enforcing solution, strict incentives, strategic uncertainty
JEL Classification: C720