On pure conjectural equilibrium with non-manipulable information

An information structure in a non-cooperative game determines the signal that each player observes as a function of the strategy profile. Such information structure is called non-manipulable if no player can gain new information by changing his strategy. A Conjectural Equilibrium (CE) (Battigalli in Unpublished undergraduate dissertation, 1987; Battigalli and Guaitoli 1988; Decisions, games and markets, 1997) with respect to a given information structure is a strategy profile in which each player plays a best response to his conjecture about his opponents’ play and his conjecture is not contradicted by the signal he observes. We provide a sufficient condition for the existence of pure CE in games with a non-manipulable information structure. We then apply this condition to prove existence of pure CE in two classes of games when the information that players have is the distribution of strategies in the population. This work is based on a chapter from my Ph.D. dissertation written at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Ehud Lehrer. I am grateful to Ehud Lehrer as well as to Pierpaolo Battigalli, Yuval Heller, two anonymous referees, an Associate Editor and the Editor for very helpful comments and references.