This chapter is devoted to the study of Nash equilibria, and correlated equilibria in both finite and infinite games. We restrict our discussions to only those properties that are somewhat special to the case of two-person games. Many of these properties fail to extend even to three-person...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 R ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation....

Previous evidence shows that better insurance coverage increases medical expenditure. However, formal studies on the effect of spending on health outcomes, and especially mental health, are lacking. To fill this gap, we reanalyze data from the Rand Health Insurance Experiment and estimate a...

This chapter examines the conceptual foundations of the concept of strategic equilibrium and its various variants and refinements. The emphasis is very much on the underlying ideas rather than on any technical details.After an examination of some pre-equilibrium ideas, in particular the concept...

This chapter of the Handbook of Game Theory (Vol. 3) provides an overview of the theory of Nash equilibrium and its refinements. The starting-point is the rationalistic approach to games and the question whether there exists a convincing, self-enforcing theory of rational behavior in...

In one of the most influential existence theorems in mathematics, John F. Nash proved in 1950 that any normal form game has an equilibrium. More than five decades later, it was shown that the computational task of finding such an equilibrium is intractable, that is, unlikely to be carried out...

Traditional game theory studies strategic interactions in which the agents make rational decisions. Evolutionary game theory differs in two key respects: the focus is on large populations of individuals who interact at random rather than on small numbers of players; and individuals are assumed...

This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...