Normal form
A game written down as a list of players, the strategies open to each of them, and the payoff for every combination of strategies.
Often misread asThinking the normal form can only represent games where the players literally choose at the same instant.
How to see it
The whole game flattened into a single simultaneous choice
The normal form writes a game as a table: every player picks one complete strategy, all at once, and the table says what everyone gets. Even a game played out over time can be written this way, because a strategy already contains every decision.
The checkSimultaneous means neither player has seen the other's choice, not that the clocks agree.
Try itConvert a two-stage game into its table, find every Nash equilibrium, then check which of them still make sense in the tree. The ones that do not are exactly what the flattening hid.
Games that show it
Know these first
Leads on to
Easily confused with
Sources
- von Neumann, J. & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Princeton UP.
- Osborne, M. & Rubinstein, A. (1994). MIT Press.