Abstract (eng)
This dissertation consists of three papers dealing with the analysis of games in which time is essential.
The first paper, "Payoff-Relevance” deals with the foundations behind the solution concept of Markov perfect equilibrium in games with observable actions. This solution concept is based on a notion of payoff-relevant states. Maskin and Tirole have shown that one can derive the states from the extensive
form under certain finiteness assumptions. This paper shows that these assumptions can be disposed of. Moreover, it is shown that the approach of Maskin and Tirole is not invariant with respect to payoff-irrelevant relabellings of actions. For a large class of games, a fix is provided in the form of a canonical labeling that respects certain symmetries within the game.
In the second paper, "Commitment in Extensive Form Games”, I analyze what can happen if players in an extensie form game are allowed to make binding public commitments at each stage. It is shown that every outcome induced by a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is compatible with these commitment
possibilities. A series of examples illustrates the approach.
The third paper, "Strategic Stochastic Processes” is joint work with Klaus Ritzberger. We formulate and prove a version of Kuhn’s theorem in a general measure theoretic framework: In a game of perfect recall, there exists for each mixed strategy of a player a behavior strategy such that the induced distribution over outcomes is the same, no matter how other players behave. In the process, we introduce a clean way of modeling partitional information in a measure theoretic framework.