Can Legal Actors Play Equilibrium Strategies? Two Dubious Assumptions in the Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Law – Article by Daniel Enemark

From Volume 86, Number 3 (March 2013)
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Strategic actors often require a great deal of informational and computational resources to calculate game-theoretic equilibria, and scholars need a precise accounting of incentives in order to model the decisions faced by these actors. Rarely are both of these conditions—player rationality and payoff quantifiability—met when scholars attempt to model the behavior of individual actors in the law (especially the behavior of lay people such as jurors, litigants, or criminals). Behavioral economists have proposed posthoc adjustments to account for the failure of player rationality, but these adjustments—if they are indeed correct—make the pursuit of equilibrium impossible for any actor with realistic informational and cognitive resources. This Article discusses the necessary conditions for the emergence of equilibrium strategies, and identifies examples of legal scholarship in which the use of equilibrium solution concepts is problematic because of the improbability that these conditions are met.


 

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