English

The algebra of predicting agents

Computer Science and Game Theory 2018-03-28 v1

Abstract

The category of open games, which provides a strongly compositional foundation of economic game theory, is intermediate between symmetric monoidal and compact closed. More precisely it has counits with no corresponding units, and a partially defined duality. There exist open games with the same types as unit maps, given by agents with the strategic goal of predicting a future value. Such agents appear in earlier work on selection functions. We explore the algebraic properties of these agents via the symmetric monoidal bicategory whose 2-cells are morphisms between open games, and show how the resulting structure approximates a compact closed category with a family of lax commutative bialgebras.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.10131,
  title  = {The algebra of predicting agents},
  author = {Joe Bolt and Jules Hedges and Viktor Winschel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.10131},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:06:31.413Z