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Generic 4 x 4 Two Person Games Have at Most 15 Nash Equilibria

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  • McLennan, Andrew
  • Park, In-Uck

Abstract

The maximal generic number of Nash equilibria for two person games in which the two agents each have four pure strategies is shown to be 15. In contrast to Keiding (1995), who arrives at this result by computer enumeration, our argument is based on a collection of lemmas that constrain the set of equilibria. Several of these pertain to any common number d of pure strategies for the two agents.
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  • McLennan, Andrew & Park, In-Uck, 1999. "Generic 4 x 4 Two Person Games Have at Most 15 Nash Equilibria," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 111-130, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:26:y:1999:i:1:p:111-130
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    1. Faruk Gül & David Pearce & Ennio Stacchetti, 1993. "A Bound on the Proportion of Pure Strategy Equilibria in Generic Games," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 18(3), pages 548-552, August.
    2. McKelvey, Richard D. & McLennan, Andrew, 1997. "The Maximal Number of Regular Totally Mixed Nash Equilibria," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 411-425, February.
    3. McLennan, Andrew, 1997. "The Maximal Generic Number of Pure Nash Equilibria," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 408-410, February.
    4. Keiding, Hans, 1997. "On the Maximal Number of Nash Equilibria in ann x nBimatrix Game," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 21(1-2), pages 148-160, October.
    5. Powers, Imelda Yeung, 1990. "Limiting Distributions of the Number of Pure Strategy Nash Equilibria in N-Person Games," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 19(3), pages 277-286.
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    Cited by:

    1. Jun Honda, 2015. "Games with the Total Bandwagon Property," Department of Economics Working Papers wuwp197, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Economics.
    2. Conitzer, Vincent & Sandholm, Tuomas, 2008. "New complexity results about Nash equilibria," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 621-641, July.
    3. Rahul Savani & Bernhard von Stengel, 2016. "Unit vector games," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 12(1), pages 7-27, March.
    4. Philip V. Fellman & Jonathan Vos Post, 2007. "Quantum Nash Equilibria and Quantum Computing," Papers 0707.0324, arXiv.org.
    5. Jun Honda, 2018. "Games with the total bandwagon property meet the Quint–Shubik conjecture," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 47(3), pages 893-912, September.
    6. Ɖura-Georg Granić & Johannes Kern, 2016. "Circulant games," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 80(1), pages 43-69, January.
    7. Sun, Ching-jen, 2020. "A sandwich theorem for generic n × n two person games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 86-95.
    8. McLennan, Andrew & Berg, Johannes, 2005. "Asymptotic expected number of Nash equilibria of two-player normal form games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 264-295, May.
    9. Ravi Kannan & Thorsten Theobald, 2010. "Games of fixed rank: a hierarchy of bimatrix games," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 42(1), pages 157-173, January.
    10. M. Punniyamoorthy & Sarin Abraham & Jose Joy Thoppan, 2023. "A Method to Select Best Among Multi-Nash Equilibria," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 11(1), pages 101-127, April.
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    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games

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