The cutting power of preparation

In a strategic game, a curb set [Basu and Weibull, Econ. Letters 36 (1991) 141] is a product set of pure strategies containing all best responses to every possible belief restricted to this set. Prep sets [Voorneveld, Games Econ. Behav. 48 (2004) 403] relax this condition by only requiring the presence of at least one best response to such a belief. The purpose of this paper is to provide economically interesting classes of games in which minimal prep sets give sharp predictions, whereas in relevant subclasses of these games, minimal curb sets have no cutting power whatsoever and simply consist of the entire strategy space. These classes include potential games, congestion games with playerspecific payoffs, and supermodular games. JEL classification: C72