Epistemic Game Research Articles

Mentor modeling: the internalization of modeled professional thinking in an epistemic game

Players of epistemic games – computer games that simulate professional practica – have been shown to develop epistemic frames: a profession's particular way of seeing and solving problems. This study examined the interactions between players and mentors in one epistemic game, Urban Science. Using a new method called epistemic network analysis, we explored how players develop epistemic frames through playing the game. Our results show that players imitate and internalize the professional way of thinking that the mentors model, suggesting that mentors can effectively model epistemic frames, and that epistemic network analysis is a useful way to chart the development of learning through mentoring relationships.

A Modal Logic of Epistemic Games

We propose some variants of a multi-modal of joint action, preference and knowledge that support reasoning about epistemic games in strategic form. The first part of the paper deals with games with complete information. We first provide syntactic proofs of some well-known theorems in the area of interactive epistemology that specify some sufficient epistemic conditions of equilibrium notions such as Nash equilibrium and Iterated Deletion of Strictly Dominated Strategies (IDSDS). Then, we present a variant of the logic extended with dynamic operators of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL). We show that it allows to express the notion IDSDS in a more compact way. The second part of the paper deals with games with weaker forms of complete information. We first discuss several assumptions on different aspects of perfect information about the game structure (e.g., the assumption that a player has perfect knowledge about the players’ strategy sets or about the preference orderings over strategy profiles), and show that every assumption is expressed by a corresponding logical axiom of our logic. Then we provide a proof of Harsanyi’s claim that all uncertainty about the structure of a game can be reduced to uncertainty about payoffs. Sound and complete axiomatizations of the logics are given, as well as some complexity results for the satisfiability problem.

An algorithm for proper rationalizability

Proper rationalizability ( Schuhmacher, 1999; Asheim, 2001) is a concept in epistemic game theory based on the following two conditions: (a) a player should be cautious, that is, should not exclude any opponentʼs strategy from consideration; and (b) a player should respect the opponentsʼ preferences, that is, should deem an opponentʼs strategy s i infinitely more likely than s i ′ if he believes the opponent to prefer s i to s i ′ . A strategy is properly rationalizable if it can optimally be chosen under common belief in the events (a) and (b). In this paper we present an algorithm that for every finite game computes the set of all properly rationalizable strategies. The algorithm is based on the new idea of a preference restriction, which is a pair ( s i , A i ) consisting of a strategy s i , and a subset of strategies A i , for player i. The interpretation is that player i prefers some strategy in A i to s i . The algorithm proceeds by successively adding preference restrictions to the game.

INTERPERSONAL COORDINATION AND EPISTEMIC SUPPORT FOR INTENTIONS WITH WE-CONTENT

In this paper I study intentions of the form ‘I intend that we . . .’, that is, intentions with a we-content, and their role in interpersonal coordination. I focus on the notion of epistemic support for such intentions. Using tools from epistemic game theory and epistemic logic, I cast doubt on whether such support guarantees the other agents' conditional mediation in the achievement of such intentions, something that appears important if intentions with a we-content are to count as genuine intentions. I then formulate a stronger version of epistemic support, one that does indeed ensure the required mediation, but I then argue that it rests on excessively strong informational conditions. In view of this I provide an alternative set of conditions that are jointly sufficient for coordination in games, and I argue that these conditions constitute a plausible alternative to the proposed notion of epistemic support.

Kernel-based type spaces

Abstract Type space is of fundamental importance in epistemic game theory. This paper shows how to build type space if players approach the game in a way advocated by Bernheim's justification procedure. If an agent fixes a strategy profile of her opponents and ponders which of their beliefs about her set of strategies make this profile optimal, such an analysis is represented by kernels and yields disintegrable beliefs. Our construction requires that underlying space is Polish.

Rationality and common knowledge

A central finding in interactive epistemology is that rational agents implement Nash equilibria when there is a commonality of knowledge in the form of common priors and common knowledge of key aspects of the strategic interaction. Epistemic game theory, however, fails to articulate the general conditions of knowledge sharing. This paper makes explicit the fundamental epistemological assumptions behind knowledge sharing.

Between Game Theory and Institutional Studies: The Dual-Dualities of the Institutional Process

Abstract. In institutional studies various concepts and terms have been proposed to describe institutional phenomena and their nature. They include behavioral regularity, habituation, collective intentionality, common knowledge, shared beliefs, artifacts, rules of the game, system of signs, and many more. Depending on which of these are adopted as major concepts, varied methodologies may be distinguished. This paper attempts to relate some of these concepts into a unified framework for an understanding of institutional phenomena and processes. Specifically, it interprets some achievements in epistemic and potential game theory in the context of institutional studies. Although game theory is sometimes regarded as a quintessential example of the theoretical approach based on methodological individualism, it suggests that notions of external artifacts (public representations) and internal mental states (internal representations), as well as those of agency and sociality, should not be taken as opposing concepts. The combination of these four elements suggests the dual-dualities of institutional processes.

Understanding Douglass North in game-theoretic language

By using game-theoretic language, this paper attempts to interpret the North's recent framework for institutional studies. Particularly relying on a foundational study of knowledge and culture in epistemic game theory, it clarifies three subtly different meanings of the beliefs used by North – behavioral, cultural, and elites’ subjective – in the evolutions of institutions. It also suggests the ways to respond to the North's call for interdisciplinary approach by applying analytical tools of strategic complementarities and linked games.

Institutions as Cognitive Media between Strategic Interactions and Individual Beliefs

Based on fundamental studies of knowledge theory and epistemic game theory, this paper discusses the role of institutions in substantive forms as societal artifacts that cognitively mediates the strategic interactions and individual beliefs in the societal games. This approach is termed as the institutions-as-cognitive-media-view and its implications to the role of culture, institutional complementarities, habits and emotion, social norms, policy, and so on in institutional evolution are discussed in epistemic-game theoretic framework. In sum, it proposes a three level approach to institutions: generic-ontological, comparative-substantive and policy-design levels.

When do type structures contain all hierarchies of beliefs?

Abstract Hierarchies of beliefs play a central role in game theory. In practice, they are modeled by type structures. This allows the analyst to describe hierarchies without explicitly specifying an infinite sequence of beliefs. The focus of this paper is type structures that contain all hierarchies of beliefs. Can the analyst identify these structures without explicit reference to hierarchies? That is, does there exist a test, defined on the type structure alone, so that the structure passes this test only if it contains all hierarchies of beliefs? This paper investigates one such test. The test is based on the concept of completeness [Brandenburger, A., 2003. On the existence of a ‘complete’ possibility structure. In: Basili, M., Dimitri, N., Gilboa, I. (Eds.), Cognitive Processes and Economic Behavior. Routledge, pp. 30–34], a concept that has played an important role in epistemic game theory.

The local best response criterion: An epistemic approach to equilibrium refinement

The standard refinement criteria for extensive form games, including subgame perfect, perfect, perfect Bayesian, sequential, and proper, reject important classes of reasonable Nash equilibria and accept many unreasonable Nash equilibria. This paper develops a new refinement criterion, based on epistemic game theory, that captures the concept of a Nash equilibrium that is plausible when players are rational. I call this the local best response (LBR) criterion. This criterion is conceptually simpler than the standard refinement criteria because it does not depend on out-of-equilibrium, counterfactual, or passage to the limit arguments. The LBR is also informationally richer because it clarifies the epistemic conditions that render a Nash equilibrium reasonable. The LBR criterion appears to render the traditional refinement criteria superfluous.

The Shaffer–Gee perspective: Can epistemic games serve education?

This paper addresses the issue of how games can reshape education by describing current educational practices. It argues that there are conservative camps that emphasize structure and development of basic literacy and numeracy skills in education as well as liberal camps that emphasize immersion, and notices that both camps fail to train students able to address the crisis of innovation. A post-progressive pedagogy that integrates both structure and immersion to address this innovation crisis is described in the paper. It is also emphasized that epistemic games can serve as excellent tools at the hand of this post-progressive pedagogy.

When People Get in the Way

A growing body of research suggests that computer games can help players learn to integrate knowledge and skills with values in complex domains of real world problem solving. In particular, research suggests that epistemic games—games where players think and act like real world professionals—can link knowledge, skills, and values into professional ways of thinking. Here, we look at how the epistemic game Urban Science develops civic thinking in young people as they learn about urban ecology by role-playing as urban planners redesigning a city. Specifically, we ask whether and how overcoming authentic obstacles from the profession of urban planning in the virtual world of a role-playing game can link civic values with the knowledge and skills young people need to solve complex social and ecological problems—and thus be a powerful context for learning civic thinking.

Epistemic Games as Career Preparatory Experiences for Students with Disabilities

This paper looks at how computer- and video-based epistemic games can help provide career preparation experiences for young people. Epistemic games are a simulation of professional training in game form. As such, they help players try on or assume different professional identities and learn to think and act like professionals in that community. First, journalism is explored as a community of practice. Second, a study of a journalism-based epistemic game called science.net with middle school students is shared, demonstrating the learning potential of this approach. The value of a practicum for career preparation and transition planning is discussed, and readers are challenged to consider how epistemic games might benefit students with disabilities who are preparing to enter the work force.

Elements of a cognitive model of physics problem solving: Epistemic games

Although much is known about the differences between expert and novice problem solvers, knowledge of those differences typically does not provide enough detail to help instructors understand why some students seem to learn physics while solving problems and others do not. A critical issue is how students access the knowledge they have in the context of solving a particular problem. In this paper, we discuss our observations of students solving physics problems in authentic situations in an algebra-based physics class at the University of Maryland. We find that when these students are working together and interacting effectively, they often use a limited set of locally coherent resources for blocks of time of a few minutes or more. This coherence appears to provide the student with guidance as to what knowledge and procedures to access and what to ignore. Often, this leads to the students failing to apply relevant knowledge they later show they possess. In this paper, we outline a theoretical phenomenology for describing these local coherences and identify six organizational structures that we refer to as epistemic games. The hypothesis that students tend to function within the narrow confines of a fairly limited set of games provides a good description of our observations. We demonstrate how students use these games in two case studies and discuss the implications for instruction.

Epistemic frames for epistemic games

This paper, develops the concept of epistemic frames as a mechanism through which students can use experiences in video games, computer games, and other interactive learning environments to help th...

Preparing psychology and psychologists for new health care markets.

Abstract Because our training models in Clinical Psychology have not kept pace with the rapid changes in the health care marketplace, we may be in danger of preparing psychologists for markets that no longer exist. The next generations of psychologists will require the skills of the entrepreneur and the leader in addition to a range of core clinical skills. At the same time, our profession's historic commitment to science as the best epistemic game in town may founder if we fail to pay better attention to knowledge translation (i.e., how to move scientific findings expeditiously from the laboratory into practice). Two recent incidents helped crystallize my thinking about the challenges to psychology and psychologists from continuing changes in the health care marketplace.1 In the first instance, I served as a member of a working group in the Calgary Health Region designing a new ambulatory rehabilitation program that is designed to move all outpatient rehabilitation care out of the acute care sites and into the community. When operational in 2007, three community centres will provide comprehensive rehabilitation care to a diverse population, including patients with musculoskeletal injuries, amputees, neurologically ill patients, and frail seniors. The funding model for the community ambulatory rehabilitation program provided for one psychologist to provide service to all three centres and all these populations. As part of the planning exercise, the day came when the group turned to me and asked: What model of psychological services is there for this kind of program and where can we find a psychologist trained to do this work? My answer was: There isn't any model of care. We don't train psychologists for this kind of work. This is a brand new market and whoever comes to it is essentially going to have to make it up as he or she goes along. In the second instance, the Calgary Health Region leaders have realized, perhaps belatedly, the serious impact of chronic illness on the populations we serve and decided to develop a comprehensive program of care to address the needs of these populations. The initial focus of the Chronic Disease Management Strategy is on patients with diabetes, hypertension, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Much evidence converges on the conclusion that it makes sense to consider these and many other chronic illnesses to be behaviour disorders, because the kinds of things that lead to and maintain them have to do with how people act, think, and feel. Not surprisingly, Chronic Disease Management program development activities have focused heavily on habit change, lifestyle modification, and on enhancing readiness to change, all of the things that would appear to be right up psychology's professional alley. Although psychologists are involved in various aspects of these programs and in the program development activity itself, my more urgent question is: Why aren't we in charge of this? These two situations reflect the changing face of health care provision in Canada. They challenge psychology's traditional methods of preparing students for practice and the way psychology provides practitioners with the tools that they need for such practice. I propose, first, that although the health care marketplace has changed substantially, our training models and methods have not. The challenge for the next generation of psychologists and for those who train them is to prepare new graduates with the skills necessary to anticipate and adapt to entirely new markets. In addition to the clinical knowledge, skills, and judgment that we currently develop in our students and young psychologists, we need to equip them with two other critical skill sets: those of the entrepreneur and those of the leader. Second, I consider that the most critical issue for psychological training and practice in the future is no longer whether we are scientist-practitioners, scholar-practitioners, scientists, practitioners, or any other of the entities that have preoccupied us in training for the past 50 years. …

Epistemic frames for epistemic games

This paper, develops the concept of epistemic frames as a mechanism through which students can use experiences in video games, computer games, and other interactive learning environments to help them deal more effectively with situations outside of the original context of learning. Building on ideas of islands of expertise [Crowley, K., & Jacobs, M. (2002). Islands of expertise and the development of family scientific literacy. In G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley, & K. Knutson (Eds.), Learning conversations in museums. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum], communities of practice [Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press], and ways of knowing [Broudy, H. (1977). Types of knowledge and purposes of education. In R. C. Anderson, R. J. Spiro, & W. E. Montague (Eds.), Schooling and the acquisition of knowledge (pp. 1–17). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum], epistemic frames are described as the ways of knowing, of deciding what is worth knowing, and of adding to the collective body of knowledge and understanding of a community of practice. Data from two experiments [Shaffer, D. W. (2004a). Pedagogical praxis: the professions as models for post-industrial education. Teachers College Record, 106(7); Shaffer, D. W. (2004b). When computer-supported collaboration means computer-supported competition: professional mediation as a model for collaborative learning. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 15(2); Shaffer, D. W. (2005a). Studio mathematics: The epistemology and practice of design pedagogy as a model for mathematics learning (WCER Working Paper Series No. 2005-3). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Center for Educational Research] are used to show that students can incorporate epistemic frames into their identities when engaged in extended educational role-playing games. Epistemic frames are thus proposed as a possible mechanism through which sufficiently rich experiences in computer-supported games based on real-world practices may help students deal more effectively with situations in the real-world and in school subjects.

The Games of Logic and the Games of Inquiry*

Truth-definitions play a crucial role in the foundations of logic and semantics. Tarsik-type truth-definitions are not possible to formulate in a usual first-order language for itself, and they have been criticized because they do not account for what makes them definitions of truth. It has been suggested that truth should instead be characterized by reference to the «language-games» of verification and falsification. The author's game-theoretical semantics (GTS) here explained for formal first-order languages, can be thought of as a realization of this idea. More technically speaking, GTS can also be thought of as a systematization of the well-known aepsilon-delta, definitions in the foundations of analysis. In GTS, truth is not defined by reference to winning a play of a game, but as the existence of a winning strategy in the game for the verifier. In a first-order language, the game-theoretical truth-condition of a sentence S can accordingly be expressed by an explicit second-order (sigma-one-one) sentence asserting the existence of the Skolem function of S. The semantical games of GTS must be distinguished not only from the «games» of formal proof (which serve to establish logical rather than material truth) but also from the «games» in volved in our ordinary activities of verification and falsification. The latter have been modelled as games of inquiry by the author, and they are essentially epistemic games where the meaning of truth is taken for granted and where the aim of the game is to come to know certain truths. To assimilate them to the semantical games constitutive of (material) truth is a form of Meno's paradox.

Subjective Reasoning in Dynamic Games

A unified framework is developed for representation of, and reasoning about dynamic games. A game is described by the subjective knowledge of players at hypothetical situations - the epistemic game form. Subjective knowledge - termed confidence - allows us to replace objective reasoning about hypothetical events with reasoning about the confidence of hypothetical identities, i.e., the subjective reasoning of players in hypothetical situations. This leads to an endogenous definition for players' action sets. Applying subjective reasoning to the Bear-Quiche signaling game, the Burning Money game and others, provides a characterization of the dynamic reasoning by players that leads to the suggested solutions for these games. For perfect information games, rationality and common confidence of future rationality imply backward induction, although common confidence of rationality can logically contradict the definition of the game.