Bangalore , India July 2012 2 . Extensive Form

In the previous chapter, we have got introduced to strategic form games. In this chapter, we introduce extensive form games. The extensive form of a game represents a detailed and richly structured way to describe a game. This form was first proposed by von Neumann and Morgenstern [1] and was later refined by Kuhn [2]. The extensive form captures complete sequential play of a game. Specifically it captures (1) who moves when (2) what actions each player may play (3) what the players know before playing at each stage (4) what the outcomes are as a function of the actions, and (5) payoffs that players obtain from each outcome. Extensive form games are depicted graphically using game trees. We first present a few simple examples.