The theory of extensive form games (Q346678)

This book is a definitive presentation of the theory of extensive form games (in particular, its perfect information version). While the most basic presentation of this theory provides the tools for the analysis in most applications of Game Theory involving several steps of decision, this book covers a lot more of material. This book is written for game theorists interested in the mathematical foundations of their discipline. In this sense, it presents fully formalized definitions of concepts that usually are glossed over in most of the literature. The discrete mathematical and order-theoretical concepts used in the book allow to find interesting counterexamples (for instance, see Example 5.1, showing that not always a strategy profile corresponds to an outcome). Of particular interest is the analysis of the formal definition of equilibria in extensive form games. Theorem 7.2 relates the topology on the set of plays to the possibility of examining the existence of equilibria. This generalizes the proof of existence of subgame perfect equilibria in large games. In this sense, this book provides a useful reference on the ways of analyzing large (infinite) game trees. It will be interesting to see follow-ups by these or other authors, extending this to imperfect information games. It seems that the topology on the space of moves can be related to Borel algebras on information sets, and therefore provide the basis of the probabilistic measures that yield expected payoffs.