Impulse Balance Theory and its Extension by an Additional Criterion: Edition 2

Reinhard Selten

May 2015 · BoD – Books on Demand

About this eBook

In this paper I present a description of the theory of impulse balance. This theory predicts a mixed strategy for every player in an arbitrary n-person game in normal form. However, this mixed strategy is not interpreted as the result of a process of rational deliberation, but rather the behavioral distribution of pure strategies in a long section of a supergame of the normal form game. In a business problem not directly treatable by impulse balance the theory can be applied nevertheless with the help of an additional criterion 70% correct long term predictions of the future distribution of decision behavior were obtained in the evaluation of first experiements.

About the author

Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Reinhard Selten was born in Breslau at October 5, 1930. Reinhard Selten finished highschool in 1950 at Melsungen and then began to study mathematics at Frankfurt a. M.. Reinhard Selten received his Ph. D. in 1961 at Frankfurt a. M. His Ph. D. thesis was on valuation of n-person games. Reinhard Selten spent one academic year in 1967-1968 at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Visiting Full Professor. Since 1969 until 1996 Reinhard Selten taught economic theory first at the Free University of Berlin, then at the University of Bielefeld and finally at the University of Bonn. Together with John Harsanyi and John F. Nash Reinhard Selten received in 1994 the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize. The price was awarded for foundational work in gamee theory. During his stay at Bonn he founded the first computerized laboratory in Europe. He received 11 honorary doctorates from universities in Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States and China. In 2005 he became the leader of the workinggroup "Rationality in the Light of Experimental Economics" of the Northrhine-Westfalian Academy of Sciences and Arts at the University of Bonn. He resigned from this position in September 2014 and finished working for this group at Oktober 2014. Since then he works in his home. He was married with his first wife from 1959 until her death at March 2014. He married again in September 2014.