On the Existence of approximative Equilibria and Sharing Rule Solutions in Discontinuous Games

Journal article: This paper studies the existence of equilibrium solution concepts in a large class of economic models with discontinuous payoff functions. The issue is well understood for Nash equilibria, thanks to Reny's better-reply security condition (Reny (1999)), and its recent improvements (Barelli and Meneghel (2013); McLennan et al. (2011); Reny (2009, 2011)). We propose new approaches, related to Reny's work, and obtain tight conditions for the existence of approximate equilibria and of sharing rule solutions in pure and mixed strategies (Simon and Zame (1990)). As byproducts, we prove that many auction games with correlated types admit an approximate equilibrium, and that many competition models have a sharing rule solution.

Author(s)

Philippe Bich, Rida Laraki

Journal
  • Theoretical Economics
Date of publication
  • 2017
Keywords JEL
C02 C62 C72
Keywords
  • Reny equilibrium
  • Approximate equilibrium
  • Timing games
  • Strategic approximation
  • Auctions
  • Discontinuous games
  • Better-reply security
  • Sharing rules
Pages
  • 79–108
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 12