A Modal Logic of Epistemic Games

Abstract

We propose some variants of a multi-modal of joint action, preference and knowledge that support reasoning about epistemic games in strategic form. The first part of the paper deals with games with complete information. We first provide syntactic proofs of some well-known theorems in the area of interactive epistemology that specify some sufficient epistemic conditions of equilibrium notions such as Nash equilibrium and Iterated Deletion of Strictly Dominated Strategies (IDSDS). Then, we present a variant of the logic extended with dynamic operators of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL). We show that it allows to express the notion IDSDS in a more compact way. The second part of the paper deals with games with weaker forms of complete information. We first discuss several assumptions on different aspects of perfect information about the game structure (e.g., the assumption that a player has perfect knowledge about the players’ strategy sets or about the preference orderings over strategy profiles), and show that every assumption is expressed by a corresponding logical axiom of our logic. Then we provide a proof of Harsanyi’s claim that all uncertainty about the structure of a game can be reduced to uncertainty about payoffs. Sound and complete axiomatizations of the logics are given, as well as some complexity results for the satisfiability problem.

Keywords

• game theory
• modal logic
• dynamic epistemic logic