A note on strictly competitive games

Abstract

Strictly competitive games are a class of 2-player games often quoted in the literature to be a proper generalization of zero-sum games. Other times it is claimed, e.g. by Aumann, that strictly competitive games are only payoff transformations of zero-sum games. But to the best of our knowledge there is no proof of such claim. We shed light to this point of confusion in the literature, showing that any strictly competitive game is indeed a payoff transformation of a zero sum-game; in fact, an affine transformation. We offer two proofs of this fact, one combinatorial and one algebraic. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.