Review of Economic Studies Vol. 69 No. 3 2002
Equilibrium in Justifiable Strategies: A Model of Reason-based Choice in Extensive-form Games
Abstract
I explore the idea that people care about the justifiability of their decisions in the context of two-person extensive games. Each player justifies his strategy s with a belief b of the opponent's strategy which is consistent with the play path and maximally plausible (according to some exogenous criterion). We say that s is justifiable if against the ex post criticism that some other strategy s′ outperforms s against b, the player can argue that playing s′ would have exposed him to similar criticism in the opposite direction. Under a simplicity-based plausibility criterion, this concept implies systematic departures from maximizing behaviour in familiar games.
- DOI
- 10.1111/1467-937x.00222
- Volume
- 69
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 691-706
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref