Doing it now, later, or never

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Working paper
Author/s: 
Kutay Cingiz, Jànos Flesch, P. Jean-Jacques Herings
Issue number: 
RM/15/022
Series: 
GSBE
Publisher: 
Maastricht University
Year: 
2015
We study centipede games played by an infinite sequence of players. Following the literature on time-inconsistent preferences, we distinguish two types of decision makers, naive and sophisticated, and the corresponding solution concepts, nave -equilibrium and sophisticated -equilibrium. We show the existence of both naive and sophisticated -equilibria for each positive . Under the assumption that the payoff functions are upper semicontinuous, we furthermore show that there exist both naive and sophisticated 0-equilibria in pure strategies. We also compare the probability to stop of a naive versus a sophisticated decision maker and show that a sophisticated decision maker stops earlier.
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