A Guide to Knowledge and Games

This paper serves as an informal introduction to some of the main concepts in non-cooperative games as well as a guide to where more careful treatments can be found. We pay particular attention to the explicit and implicit role of knowledge and information in games. No attempt is made to be formal and exhaustive. The interested reader should refer to the excellent book of Luce and Raiffa (195) which covers the classical material exhaustively and to the almost encyclopaedic lecture note of Van Damme (1983) which covers the vast literature on refinements of solution concepts. Games of incomplete information games are dealt with in Harsanyi (1967--68) and Myerson (1985a) at a foundational level. Tan and Werlang (1984, 1986) provides an environment in which games and the knowledge of players in games are explicitly modelled and several solution concepts are derived from axioms placed on the knowledge of players. As this note was prepared in a short time, some of the notation used may appear to be cryptic and unexplained. The intention is to go through these notes at the conference to clarify the points. The notation however, is more or less standard in literature on games.

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