Game theory is a widely used tool in economics, political science, and psychology to study the behavior of individuals in strategic situations. It involves analyzing the choices made by individuals or groups of individuals in situations where their choices are interdependent. Game theory has been used to analyze various scenarios, including military conflicts, business negotiations, and political elections.
One of the key concepts in game theory is that of a feasible strategy. A feasible strategy is a set of actions that a player can take in a game that is consistent with their beliefs about what other players might do. In other words, a feasible strategy is one that takes into account the actions of other players and responds to them accordingly.
Feasible strategies can be classified into two types: pure strategies and mixed strategies. A pure strategy is a specific action or set of actions that a player will take in every situation. For example, if you always choose to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma game, then your pure strategy is to cooperate.
On the other hand, a mixed strategy is a probability distribution over all possible pure strategies. For example, if you choose to cooperate with probability 0.7 and defect with probability 0.3 in the prisoner’s dilemma game, then your mixed strategy assigns probabilities to both cooperating and defecting.
A feasible strategy is said to be dominant if it always yields better results than any other feasible strategy regardless of what other players do. A dominant strategy can be either pure or mixed. For example, in the prisoner’s dilemma game, defecting is always a dominant strategy for both players regardless of what the other player does.
However, not all games have dominant strategies. In such cases, players must use non-dominant but still feasible strategies that take into account what they think their opponents might do. These non-dominant strategies are called Nash equilibria.
A Nash equilibrium occurs when each player chooses their best response given what they think the other player will do. In other words, a Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies where each player is playing their best response to the other player’s strategy. The Nash equilibrium is named after John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on game theory.
In conclusion, feasible strategies are an essential concept in game theory because they allow players to make decisions that take into account what they think their opponents might do. Pure and mixed strategies can both be feasible, and dominant strategies can be either pure or mixed. When there is no dominant strategy, players must use non-dominant but still feasible strategies that lead to Nash equilibria.