The Language of Game Theory: Putting Epistemics into the Mathematics of Games

This volume contains eight papers written by Adam Brandenburger and his co-authors over a period of 25 years. These papers are part of a program to reconstruct game theory in order to make what players believe about a game a central feature of the theory. The program — now called epistemic game theory — extends the classical definition of a game model to include not only the game matrix or game tree, but also what each player believes about how the game will be played, and even higher-order beliefs. With this richer mathematical framework, it becomes possible to determine what different configurations of beliefs among the players imply for how a game is played. Epistemic game theory includes traditional equilibrium-based theory as a special case, but allows for a wide range of non-equilibrium behavior.