Coalitional rationalizability

Abstract

This paper investigates how groups or coalitions of players can act in their collective interest in noncooperative normal form games even if equilibrium play is not assumed. The main idea is that each member of a coalition will confine play to a subset of their strategies if it is in their mutual interest to do so. An iterative procedure of restrictions is used to define a noncooperative solution concept, the set of coalitionally rationalizable strategies. The procedure is analogous to iterative deletion of never best response strategies, but operates on implicit agreements by different coalitions. The solution set is a nonempty subset of the rationalizable strategies. © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.