Strategic behavior in non-atomic games

Barlo, Mehmet and Carmona, Guilherme (2011): Strategic behavior in non-atomic games.

Abstract

In order to remedy the possible loss of strategic interaction in non-atomic games with a societal choice, this study proposes a refinement of Nash equilibrium, strategic equilibrium. Given a non-atomic game, its perturbed game is one in which every player believes that he alone has a small, but positive, impact on the societal choice; and a distribution is a strategic equilibrium if it is a limit point of a sequence of Nash equilibrium distributions of games in which each player's belief about his impact on the societal choice goes to zero. After proving the existence of strategic equilibria, we show that all of them must be Nash. Moreover, it is displayed that in many economic applications, the set of strategic equilibria coincides with that of Nash equilibria of large finite games.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Strategic equilibrium; Games with a continuum of players; Equilibrium distributions
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory > C72 - Noncooperative Games

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