Strong Nash equilibria and mixed strategies

Braggion, Eleonora, Gatti, Nicola, Lucchetti, Roberto, Sandholm, Thomas and Von Stengel, Bernhard ORCID: 0000-0002-3488-8322 (2020) Strong Nash equilibria and mixed strategies. International Journal of Game Theory, 49 (3). 699 - 710. ISSN 0020-7276

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Abstract

We study strong Nash equilibriain mixed strategies in finite games. A Nash equilibrium is strong if no coalition of players can jointly deviate so that all players in the coalition get strictly better payoffs. Our main result concerns games with two players and states that if a game admits a strong Nash equilibrium, then the payoff pairs in the support of the equilibrium lie on a straight line in the players’ utility space. As a consequence, the set of games that have a strong Nash equilibrium in which at least one player plays a mixed strategy has measure zero. We show that the same property holds for games with more than two players, already when no coalition of two players can profitably deviate. Furthermore, we show that, in contrast to games with two players, in a strong Nash equilibrium an outcome that is strictly Pareto dominated may occur with positive probability.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.springer.com/journal/182
Additional Information:	© 2020 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature
Divisions:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Date Deposited:	03 Jun 2020 13:24
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:11
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/104714

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