A Primer on Strategic Games

TL;DR

This paper provides an introductory overview of strategic games, covering core concepts like Nash equilibrium, dominance, mixed strategies, and their relations, along with an introduction to mechanism design and pre-Bayesian games.

Contribution

It offers a concise primer on strategic game concepts, their interrelations, and introduces mechanism design and pre-Bayesian games for the first time in this context.

Findings

Clarifies the relationship between best response, Nash equilibrium, and dominance.

Explores variants of strategic game definitions.

Introduces mechanism design and pre-Bayesian games as foundational concepts.

Abstract

This is a short introduction to the subject of strategic games. We focus on the concepts of best response, Nash equilibrium, strict and weak dominance, and mixed strategies, and study the relation between these concepts in the context of the iterated elimination of strategies. Also, we discuss some variants of the original definition of a strategic game. Finally, we introduce the basics of mechanism design and use pre-Bayesian games to explain it.