My Research in Epistemic Game Theory

Epistemic game theory is not a specialization within game theory, but rather a particular way to look at game theory. The purpose of epistemic game theory is namely to model, and analyze, possible ways in which a player in a game may reason about his opponents. This reasoning process is really fundamental in game theory: before a player makes a choice in a game, he must form a belief about what his opponents will do, which in turn is based on what he believes that his opponents believe that others will do. That is, before making a choice, a player must reason about his opponents, and subsequently base his choice on this process of reasoning.  

In order to fully understand the behavioral consequences of a particular way of reasoning about your opponents, it is necessary to build a formal mathematic model that precisely describes this way of reasoning.

 Once such a model has been delivered, we can logically derive the choices that a player can rationally make if he follows this pattern of reasoning.

If possible, we may try to find an algorithm that computes, for a given player, all the choices he can rationally make if he follows this pattern of reasoning.

Some of my papers investigate dynamic games, in which players choose sequentially, rather than simultaneously. An additional problem in dynamic games is belief revision: if a player initially believes that his opponent chooses strategy x, but observes later on that the opponent has not chosen x, then this player should revise his belief about the opponent's strategy choice, and possibly also revise his belief about the opponent's beliefs. But how ?

In my epistemic papers on dynamic games, I have investigated possible intuitive ways in which a player may revise his belief about his opponents during the game. I have also incorporated these belief revision policies into formal epistemic models for dynamic games, and analyzed the behavioral consequences of such models.

Until now, my papers on epistemic game theory are:

These papers can be found under publications and working papers.