Players' information in extensive games (Q1197630)

An extensive game represents information available to any player when making a decision based on information sets. This paper attempts to formalize the amount of information which is available to the players at ``all'' decision nodes of the game tree. With every decision node and every player a subset of terminal nodes is associated under the information set constraints. The interpretation is that, if the node is reached, the player knows that only terminal nodes in the subset are possible. In this formulation, there is a freedom about how to define information available to every player at other player's nodes. Two definitions of information are given, which are considered as the minimum and maximum amounts of information available to the player. Such well- known notions as perfect recall, perfect information, and simultaneity are characterized in terms of the suggested definitions of information.