Journal Article

Structured equilibria for dynamic games with asymmetric information and dependent types

Anastasopoulos, Achilleas, Heydaribeni, Nasimeh

2025

Overview

We consider a dynamic game with asymmetric information where each player privately observes a noisy version of a (hidden) state of the world V, resulting in dependent private observations. We study the structured perfect Bayesian equilibria (PBEs) that use private beliefs in their strategies as sufficient statistics for summarizing their observation history. The main difficulty in finding the appropriate sufficient statistic (state) for the structured strategies arises from the fact that players need to construct (private) beliefs on other players' private beliefs on V, which, in turn, would imply that one needs to construct an infinite hierarchy of beliefs, thus rendering the problem unsolvable. We show that this is not the case: each player’s belief on other players' beliefs on V can be characterized by her own belief on V and some appropriately defined public belief. We then specialize this setting to the case of a Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) non-zero-sum game, and we characterize structured PBEs with linear strategies that can be found through a backward/forward algorithm akin to dynamic programming for the standard LQG control problem. Unlike the standard LQG problem, however, some of the required quantities for the Kalman filter are observation-dependent and, thus, cannot be evaluated offline through a forward recursion.

• Publisher: MDPI,MDPI AG
• Subject: Asymmetry / dynamic games with asymmetric information / Dynamic programming / Equilibrium / Games / Kalman filters / Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) games / Linear quadratic Gaussian control / Literature reviews / perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) / Players / Random variables / Social networks / Statistics / structured equilibria / Zero sum games