Robert Schmidt (University of Hagen) will be presenting his paper “On the timing of moves in two-player games“ (co-authored with Leanne Streekstra, Larry Karp, and Leo Simon) on November 22nd at 10 AM, room QA405. One-to-one meetings with the speaker can be arranged; please contact the seminar organizers, Dr. Noémie Cabau (cabau.noemie@gtk.bme.hu) and Dr. Arseniy Samsonov (samsonov.arseniy@gtk.bme.hu).
Abstract: We analyze two-player games in continuous time in which each player is free to decide when to move and what action to implement. The number of moves per player is restricted to (at most) one. We arrive at sharp predictions about the equilibrium outcome in certain classes of games, for which we can predict the timing of players’ moves, as well as the identity of the leader in a unique equilibrium outcome with sequential moves. This includes games with a second-mover advantage and non-trivial action sets that are traditionally analyzed in static settings. We illustrate the strength of our general modeling framework by applying it to canonical games from industrial economics and political economics such as price competition, and electoral competition where candidates differ in their “valence”.