Nash equilibrium in games with quasi-monotonic best-responses

Abstract

This paper proposes a new general class of strategic games and develops an associated new existence result for pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. For a two-player game with scalar and compact action sets, existence entails that one reaction curve be increasing and continuous and the other quasi-increasing (i.e., not have any downward jumps). The latter property amounts to strategic quasi-complementarities. The paper provides a number of ancillary results of independent interest, including sufficient conditions for a quasi-increasing argmax (or non-monotone comparative statics), and new sufficient conditions for uniqueness of fixed points. For maximal accessibility of the results, the main results are presented in a Euclidean setting. We argue that all these results have broad and elementary applicability by providing simple illustrations with commonly used models in economic dynamics and industrial organization.