ON GAMES INVOLVING BLUFFING

Abstract

A class of two-person games possessing the following general characteristics are considered (a) At the beginning of the game, and at various stages of the game, a chance mechanism furnishes numbers xi and yi from the unit interval (0,1) to the two players, I and II respectively. I knows xi but not yi, II knows yi but not xi. (b) Each player pays a certain amount to start the game, regardless of his subsequent moves. (c) The game is a many-move game of the following type. I's initial move, is one of a fixed number of possible moves, which are known to II. However II does not know I's move. (d) After I has made the initial move, II has a choice of a finite number of moves, known to II, and so on. The initial maneouvering continues in this fashion for a fixed number of turns. The game continues in this way for a fixed number of phases, N, at the end of which there is a payoff to I of K and II receives - K. The problem of determining the best possible mode of play for each player in the usual sense of maximizing or minimizing the expectation is one that arises in many important applications of statistics and probability theory.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1950
Accession Number
AD0422809

Entities

People

  • David Blackwell
  • Richard E. Bellman

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Distribution Functions
  • Equations
  • Government Procurement
  • Governments
  • Intervals
  • Notation
  • Probability
  • Procurement
  • Statistics
  • Step Functions

Readers

  • Game Theory.
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Nuclear Civil Defense.