We consider strategic-form games with ordinal payoffs and provide a syntactic analysis of common belief/knowledge of rationality, which we define axiomatically. Two axioms are considered. The first says that a player is irrational if she chooses a particular strategy while believing that another...

We discuss a number of conceptual issues that arise in attempting to capture, in dynamic games, the notion that there is common understanding among the players that they are all rational.

Recent contributions have questioned the meaningfulness of the Common Prior Assumption (CPA) in situations of incomplete information. We characterize the CPA in terms of the primitives (individuals' belief hierarchies) without reference to an ex ante stage. The key is to rule out "agreeing to...

We discuss a number of conceptual issues that arise in attempting to capture, in dynamic games, the notion that there is "common understanding" among the players that they are all rational.

This working paper contains the slides of two invited lectures on the Epistemic Foundations of Game Theory, delivered at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) on February 8, 2007.

We consider strategic-form games with ordinal payoffs and provide a syntactic analysis of common belief/knowledge of rationality, which we define axiomatically. Two axioms are considered. The first says that a player is irrational if she chooses a particular strategy while believing that another...