Wishful thinking in strategic environments

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Wishful thinking in strategic environments

B Towards developing a theory of systematic biases about strategies, I analyze strategic implications of a particular bias: wishful thinking about the strategies. Considering canonical state spaces for strategic uncertainty, I identify a player as a wishful thinker at a state if she hopes to enjoy the highest payoff that is consistent with her information about the others' strategies at that state. I develop a straightforward elimination process that characterizes the strategy profiles that are consistent with wishful thinking, mutual knowledge of wishful thinking, and so on. Every pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is consistent with common knowledge of wishful thinking. For generic two-person games, I further show that the pure Nash equilibrium strategies are the only strategies that are consistent with common knowledge of wishful thinking, providing an unusual epistemic characterization for equilibrium strategies. I also investigate the strategic implications of rationality and ex-post optimism, the situation in which a player's expected payoff weakly exceeds her actual payoff. I show that, in generic games with monotonic payoff functions, these strategic implications are identical to those of wishful thinking. Keywords: optimism, strategic uncertainty, wishful thinking, self-serving biases, common-prior assumption, equilibrium. JEL Classifications: C72, D80.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
30

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Cover of: Wishful thinking in strategic environments
Wishful thinking in strategic environments
2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics
in English

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Edition Notes

"September 1, 2004."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-30).

Abstract in HTML and working paper for download in PDF available via World Wide Web at the Social Science Research Network.

Published in
Cambridge, MA
Series
Working paper series / Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics -- working paper 04-31, Working paper (Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics) -- no. 04-31.

The Physical Object

Pagination
30 p. :
Number of pages
30

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL24640023M
Internet Archive
wishfulthinkingi00yild
OCLC/WorldCat
57623777

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL15720085W

Source records

Internet Archive item record

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April 30, 2011 Edited by ImportBot Added new cover
April 30, 2011 Created by ImportBot Imported from Internet Archive item record