Mixed-strategy equilibria and strong purification for games with private and public information (Q957862)

The paper considers the following model of a noncooperative game \(\mathcal G\) with public and private information. There is a set \(N=\{1,\ldots, n\}\) of \(n\) players, and an ``information set'' of the form \(\prod_{j=0}^n S_j\times T_j\) is given. For each player \(i\in N\), \(A_i\) is his action space. The game \(\mathcal G\) is played as follows: Acording to a fixed probability distribution \(\eta\) (known to the players) an element \((s_0,s_1,\ldots, s_n, t_0,t_1,\ldots, t_n) \in \prod_{j=0}^n S_j\times T_j\) is chosen, and next, the value \(t_0\) is announced to all the players, and for \(i\in N\) the value \(t_i\) is announced only to player \(i\). Now, a player \(i\) chooses an action \(a_i\in A_i\) basing on the information about two values \((t_0,t_i)\), and then his payoff function is \(u_i(a_1,\ldots, a_n, s_0, s_i)\), where \(u_i\) is a mapping \(u_i: \prod_{j=1}A_j\times S_0\times S_i \rightarrow R\). The author finds necessary conditions that guarantee the existence of a mixed-strategy equilibrium in game \(\mathcal G\), respectively. The second result is related with the notion a strong purification of a mixed strategy profile. As a corollary, the existence of pure-strategy equilibria follows. The model of game \(\mathcal G\) considered in the paper generalizes the earlier discussed model by Milgrom and Weber where they assumed \(S_0=T_0\) and \(S_i=T_i\) for each \(i\in N\).