Games With Sequential Actions: The Perfect-Information Extensive Form

Abstract

In Chapter 1 we assumed that a game is represented in normal form: effectively, as a big table. In some sense, this is reasonable. The normal form is conceptually straightforward, and most game theorists see it as fundamental. While many other representations exist to describe finite games, we will see in this chapter and in those that follow that each of them has an “induced normal form”: a corresponding normal-form representation that preserves game-theoretic properties such as Nash equilibria. Thus the results given in previous chapters hold for all finite games, no matter how they are represented; in that sense the normal-form representation is universal.