Characterizing Consistency by Monomials and by Product Dispersions
This paper derives two characterizations of the Kreps-Wilson concept of consistent beliefs. In the first, beliefs are shown to be consistent iff they can be constructed from the elements of monomial vectors which converge to the strategies. In the second, beliefs are shown to be consistent iff they can be induced by a product dispersion whose marginal dispersions induce the strategies. The first characterization is simpler than the definition in Kreps and Wilson (1982), and the second seems more fundamental in the sense that it is built on an underlying theory of relative probability.