In games with incomplete information, conventional hierarchies of belief are incomplete as descriptions of the players' information for the purposes of determining a player's behavior. We show by example that this is true for a variety of solution concepts. We then investigate what is essential about a player's information to identify behavior. We specialize to two player games and the solution concept of interim rationalizability. We construct the universal type space for rationalizability and characterize the types in terms of their beliefs. Infinite hierarchies of beliefs over conditional beliefs, which we call Delta-hierarchies, are what turn out to matter. We show that any two types in any two type spaces have the same rationalizable sets in all games if and only if they have the same Delta-hierarchies.
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Article provided by Society for Economic Theory in its journal Theoretical Economics.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Mertens, J.-F., 1986.
"Repeated games,"
CORE Discussion Papers
1986024, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Eddie Dekel & Drew Fudenberg, 2006.
"Topologies on Type,"
Discussion Papers
1417, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Eddie Dekel & Drew Fudenberg & Stephen Morris, 2005.
"Topologies on Types,"
Levine's Bibliography
784828000000000061, UCLA Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]