English

Fictitious Play in $3\times 3$ games: chaos and dithering behaviour

Dynamical Systems 2009-03-30 v1

Abstract

In the 60's Shapley provided an example of a two player fictitious game with periodic behaviour. In this game, player AA aims to copy BB's behaviour and player BB aims to play one ahead of player AA. In this paper we continue to study a family of games which generalize Shapley's example by introducing an external parameter, and prove that there exists an abundance of periodic and chaotic behavior with players dithering between different strategies. The reason for all this, is that there exists a periodic orbit (consisting of playing mixed strategies) which is of {\em `jitter type'}: such an orbit is neither attracting, repelling or of saddle type as nearby orbits jitter closer and further away from it in a manner which is reminiscent of a random walk motion. We prove that this behaviour holds for an open set of games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.4847,
  title  = {Fictitious Play in $3\times 3$ games: chaos and dithering behaviour},
  author = {Sebastian van Strien Colin Sparrow},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.4847},
  year   = {2009}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:45:22.263Z