Doubtful Deviations and Farsighted Play

Nash equilibrium is based on the idea that a strategy profile is stable if no player can benefit from a unilateral deviation. We observe that some locally rational deviations in a strategic form game may not be profitable anymore if one takes into account the possibility of further deviations by the other players. As a solution, we propose the concept of farsighted pre-equilibrium, which takes into account only deviations that do not lead to a decrease of the player’s outcome even if some other deviations follow. While Nash equilibria are taken to include plays that are certainly rational, our pre-equilibrium is supposed to rule out plays that are certainly irrational. We prove that positional strategies are sufficient to define the concept, study its computational complexity, and show that pre-equilibria correspond to subgame-perfect Nash equilibria in a meta-game obtained by using the original payoff matrix as arena and the deviations as moves.