This paper uses variations in a popular parlor game to provide useful instructional benefits. The paper builds a classroom activity to nudge students towards thinking in a backward-inductive manner. The pedagogic innovation is in introducing the game repeatedly with progressively smaller action...

This chapter is a very compressed review of the neoclassical orthodoxy on the nature of rationality on economic theory. It defends the orthodoxy both against the behavioral criticism that it assumes too much and the revisionist view that it assumes too little. In places, especially on the...

From its inception in the marginal revolution of the 1880s, neoclassical economics has depended on the notion of a rational economic agent, a Homo economicus. Equally, the notion of rationality has been the focus of criticism from those wishing to dispute one or another aspect of mainstream...

This chapter critically analyses contributions to evolutionary game theory by such writers as Robert Trivers, John Maynard-Smith, and Robert Axelrod. It develops four key arguments. First, that the behavioral propensities that manifest themselves in altruistic behavior are empirically relevant,...

The ultimatum game is a sequential-move bargaining game in which a “giver” offers a “taker” a share of a monetary pie. The predicted subgame perfect equilibrium is for rational givers to offer the smallest possible share, and for rational takers to accept. Experimental trials conducted...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. -- Unawareness ; extensive-form games ; extensive-form...

We define an extensive-form analogue of iterated admissibility, called Prudent Rationalizability (PR). In each round of the procedure, for each information set of a player a surviving strategy of hers is required to be rational vis-a-vis a belief system with a full-support belief on the...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. We define also a new variant of this solution concept, prudent...

When evaluating the rationality of a player in an epistemic model of a noncooperative game one has to examine counterfactuals such as ``what would happen if the player were to do what he actually does not do?'' In this paper I develop an epistemic model of a normal form game where...