Wishful Thinking in Strategic Environments
分析了一种特定偏差——对他人策略的一厢情愿思维——的战略含义，证明纯策略纳什均衡是唯一与共同知识下的一厢情愿思维一致的策略，为均衡策略提供了新的认识论刻画。
Abstract. 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 these strategic implications are generically identical to those of wishful thinking whenever each player’s payoff is monotone in others ’ strategies.