Successful individuals were frequently found to be overly optimistic. These findings are puzzling, as one could expect that realists would perform best in the long run. We show, however, that in a large class of strategic interactions of either cooperation or competition, the equilibrium payoffs...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justified either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, this paper shows that in almost every game, payoff maximization...

We define a generalized state-space model with interactive unawareness and probabilistic beliefs. Such models are desirable for many potential applications of asymmetric unawareness. We develop Bayesian games with unawareness, define equilibrium, and prove existence. We show how equilibria are...

Heifetz, Meier and Schipper (2005) introduced a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals and strong properties of knowledge. We show that this generalized state-space model arises naturally if states consist of maximally consistent sets of...

The standard state-spaces of asymmetric information preclude non-trivial forms of unawareness (Modica and Rustichini, 1994, Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, 1998). We introduce a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals, and which satisfies...

This paper constructs a type space that contains all types with a finite depth of reasoning, as well as all types with an infinite depth of reasoning - in particular those types for whom finite-depth types are conceivable, or think that finite-depth types are conceivable in the mind of other...

In an important paper, Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that if players have an infinite depth of reasoning and this is commonly believed, types generically have a unique rationalizable action in games that satisfy a richness condition. We show that this result does not extend to environments...

Rationalizability is a central concept in game theory. Since there may be many rationalizable strategies, applications commonly use refinements to obtain sharp predictions. In an important paper, Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that no refinement is robust to perturbations of high-order...

We present a new solution concept for strategic games called comprehensive rationalizability that embodies "common cautious belief in rationality" based on a sound epistemic characterization in a universal type space. It refines rationalizability, but it neither refines nor is refined by...

The standard state-spaces of asymmetric information preclude non- trivial forms of unawareness (Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, 1998). We introduce a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals, and which satisfies strong properties of knowledge...