Traits and Games: How Personal Cognitive and Psychological Features Affect Strategic Behavior

Introduction

I will analyse how agents’ traits affect behaviour and strategic reasoning in decision problems and games. Traits encompass stable cognitive and psychological features of agents, such as tastes, skills, cognitive abilities, attitudes toward uncertainty and misspecification, concerns for others, and propensities to be affected by emotions.

Formal Framework

To build an adequate formal framework, I will try to comply with a separation principle: the description of the rules of interaction should be separate and independent from the description of players’ traits. This will enable a fruitful and conceptually rigorous analysis of personal traits in games, including players’ abilities and cognition, analogous to what has already been done—for example—concerning attitudes toward risk.

Interactive Strategic Thinking

Also, to model interactive strategic thinking (a.k.a. epistemic game theory), I will use a flexible approach that, unlike the standard one, does not assume common knowledge of cognitive rationality (e.g., of coherence). I will start with individual decision making and planning and then embed the analysis in interactive situations, with special attention to sequential decision making and the role of time.

Previous Work

Building on and improving upon my previous work on the foundations of game theory and psychological games, most of the analysis of the impact of traits on behaviour will be either focused on steady-state long run outcomes, using variations of the self-confirming concept, or outcomes consistent with subjective rationality and strategic reasoning, characterized by variations of rationalizability.

Research Questions

Examples of the research questions to be addressed are the following:

1. How do cognitive features affect strategic interaction?
2. Can institutions and agreements be robust to assumptions about interactive knowledge and beliefs about traits when players reason by forward induction?
3. How can we model context-dependent motivations?
4. What is the impact on the long run of concerns for misspecification?