PLAYING SAFE

Playing Safe

We consider two-player games over graphs and give tight bounds on the memory size of strategies ensuring safety conditions. More specifically, we show that the minimal number of memory states of a strategy ensuring a safety condition is given by the size of the maximal antichain of left quotients with respect to language inclusion. This result holds for all safety conditions without any regular...

Playing It Safe

Clean and Dirty: Playing with Boundaries of Consumer’s Safe Havens

The marketplace, with its continuously increasing symbolic nature and infinitely many alternative consumption choices, poses a disorderly and threatening environment for consumers. This conceptual paper discusses the ways in which consumers magically create, eliminate, or shift many boundaries surrounding them through rituals and practices related with cleanliness in order to construct a safe ‘...

Playing safe in coordination games: : the roles of risk dominance, payoff dominance, and history of play

This paper presents results from a series of experiments designed to test the impact on subject behavior of changes in the risk dominance and payoff dominance characteristics of two player coordination games. The main finding is that changes in risk dominance significantly affect play of the subjects, whereas changes in the level of payoff dominance do not. Observed history of play also has an ...

Going for Broke and Playing it Safe: Dynamic Competition with Choice of Variance

We consider a differential game, in which the joint choices of the two players influences the variance, but not the mean, of the one-dimensional state variable. We interpret this state variable as a summary of how far ‘ahead’ player 1 is in the game. The flow payoffs that the players enjoy are a continuous, monotonic and bounded function of this state variable. In any Markov Perfect Equilibrium...