Information Flows and Memory in Games

The standard extensive-form partitional representation of information in sequential games fails to distinguish the description of the rules of interaction from the description of players' personal traits. Indeed, such representation does not model how the information given to players as per the rules of the game blends with players' ability to retain such information. We propose a representation of sequential games that explicitly describes the flow of information accruing to players rather than the stock of information retained by players encoded in information partitions. Then, we add a game-independent description of players' mnemonic abilities. Assuming that players have perfect memory, our flow representation gives rise to information partitions satisfying perfect recall, but different combinations of rules about information flows and of players' mnemonic abilities may give rise to the same information partitions. Our representation is strictly more expressive than the traditional one using information partitions