Game without a value

In the mathematical theory of games, in particular the study of zero-sum continuous games, not every game has a minimax value.

This is the expected value to one of the players when both play a perfect strategy (which is to choose from a particular PDF).

This article gives an example of a zero-sum game that has no value.

It is due to Sion and Wolfe.

[1] Zero-sum games with a finite number of pure strategies are known to have a minimax value (originally proved by John von Neumann) but this is not necessarily the case if the game has an infinite set of strategies.

There follows a simple example of a game with no minimax value.

The existence of such zero-sum games is interesting because many of the results of game theory become inapplicable if there is no minimax value.

Players I and II choose numbers

That is, after the choices are made, player II pays

to player I (so the game is zero-sum).

is interpreted as a point on the unit square, the figure shows the payoff to player I.

Player I may adopt a mixed strategy, choosing a number according to a probability density function (pdf)

, and similarly player II chooses from a pdf

Player I seeks to maximize the payoff

, player II to minimize the payoff, and each player is aware of the other's objective.

Sion and Wolfe show that

These are the maximal and minimal expectations of the game's value of player I and II respectively.

respectively take the supremum and infimum over pdf's on the unit interval (actually Borel probability measures).

There is no epsilon equilibrium for sufficiently small

Dasgupta and Maskin[2] assert that the game values are achieved if player I puts probability weight only on the set

and player II puts weight only on

Glicksberg's theorem shows that any zero-sum game with upper or lower semicontinuous payoff function has a value (in this context, an upper (lower) semicontinuous function K is one in which the set

) is open for any real number c).

The payoff function of Sion and Wolfe's example is not semicontinuous.

However, it may be made so by changing the value of K(x, x) and K(x, x + 1/2) (the payoff along the two discontinuities) to either +1 or −1, making the payoff upper or lower semicontinuous, respectively.

Subsequent work by Heuer[3] discusses a class of games in which the unit square is divided into three regions, the payoff function being constant in each of the regions.