A Program for Finding Nash Equilibria

We describe two-player simultaneous-play games. First, we use a zero-sum game to illustrate minimax, dominant, and best-response strategies. We illustrate Nash equilibria in the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Battle of the Sexes Games, distinguishing among three types of Nash equilibria: a pure strategy, a mixed strategy, and a continuum (partially) mixed strategy. Then we introduce the program, Nash . m, and use it to solve sample games. We display the full code of Nash . m; finally, we discuss the performance characteristics of Nash . m.