Refinements of Nash equilibrium in potential games

Abstract

© 2014 Oriol Carbonell-Nicolau and Richard P. McLean. We prove the existence of a pure-strategy trembling-hand perfect equilibrium in upper semicontinuous potential games, and we show that generic potential games possess pure-strategy strictly perfect and essential equilibria. We also establish a more powerful result: the set of maximizers of an upper semicontinuous potential contains a strategically stable set of pure-strategy Nash equilibria.