OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We study the strategic impact of players’ higher-order uncertainty over the observability of actions in general two-player games. More specifically, we consider the space of all belief hierarchies generated by the uncertainty over whether the game will be played as a static game or with perfect information. Over this space, we characterize the correspondence of a solution concept which captures the behavioral implications of Rationality and Common Belief in Rationality (RCBR), where `rationality’ is understood as sequential whenever a player moves second. We show that such a correspondence is generically single-valued, and that its structure supports a robust refinement of rationalizability, which often has very sharp implications. For instance: (i) in a class of games which includes both zero-sum games with a pure equilibrium and coordination games with a unique efficient equilibrium, RCBR generically ensures efficient equilibrium outcomes (eductive coordination); (ii) in a class of games which also includes other well-known families of coordination games, RCBR generically selects components of the Stackelberg profiles (Stackelberg selection); (iii) if it is commonly known that player 2’s action is not observable (e.g., because 1 is commonly known to move earlier, etc.), in a class of games which includes all of the above RCBR generically selects the equilibrium of the static game most favorable to player 1 (pervasiveness of first-mover advantage).