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Psychological Nash equilibria under ambiguity

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  • De Marco, Giuseppe
  • Romaniello, Maria
  • Roviello, Alba

Abstract

Psychological games aim to represent situations in which players may have belief-dependent motivations. In this setting, utility functions are directly dependent on the entire hierarchy of beliefs of each player. On the other hand, the literature on strategic ambiguity in classical games highlights that players may have ambiguous (or imprecise) beliefs about opponents’ strategy choices. In this paper, we look at the issue of ambiguity in the framework of simultaneous psychological games by taking into account ambiguous hierarchies of beliefs and study a natural generalization of the psychological Nash equilibrium concept to this framework. We give an existence result for this new concept of equilibrium and provide examples that show that even an infinitesimal amount of ambiguity may alter significantly the equilibria of the game or can work as an equilibrium selection device. Finally, we look at the problem of stability of psychological equilibria with respect to ambiguous trembles on the entire hierarchy of correct beliefs and we provide a limit result that gives conditions so that sequences of psychological equilibria under ambiguous perturbation converge to psychological equilibria of the unperturbed game.

Suggested Citation

  • De Marco, Giuseppe & Romaniello, Maria & Roviello, Alba, 2022. "Psychological Nash equilibria under ambiguity," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 92-106.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:120:y:2022:i:c:p:92-106
    DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2022.09.005
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    Cited by:

    1. Giuseppe De Marco & Maria Romaniello & Alba Roviello, 2024. "On Hurwicz Preferences in Psychological Games," Games, MDPI, vol. 15(4), pages 1-26, July.
    2. Giuseppe De Marco & Maria Romaniello & Alba Roviello, 2022. "On Hurwicz Preferences in Psychological Games," CSEF Working Papers 659, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    3. Giuseppe De Marco & Maria Romaniello & Alba Roviello, 2025. "Guilt Aversion and Ambiguity in the Battle of Sexes Game," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 13(10), pages 1-30, May.

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