Two-Person Adversarial Games are Zero-Sum: An elaboration of a folk theorem

C-Tier
Journal: Economics Letters
Year: 2024
Volume: 242
Issue: C

Authors (3)

Khan, M. Ali (Johns Hopkins University) Pedersen, Arthur Paul (not in RePEc) Schrittesser, David (not in RePEc)

Score contribution per author:

0.335 = (α=2.01 / 3 authors) × 0.5x C-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

The observation that every two-person adversarial game is an affine transformation of a zero-sum game is traceable to Luce and Raiffa (1957) and made explicit in Aumann (1987). Recent work of Adler et al. (2009) and of Raimondo (2023) in increasing generality, proves what has so far remained a conjecture. We present two proofs of an even more general formulation: the first draws on multilinear utility theory developed by Fishburn and Roberts (1978); the second is a consequence of Adler et al.’s 2009 proof itself for a special case of a two-player game in which each player has a set of three actions.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:ecolet:v:242:y:2024:i:c:s0165176524003367
Journal Field
General
Author Count
3
Added to Database
2026-01-25