Lecture 2

Conversion of Tree Form to Normal Form

Goals for this lecture:

• 1. Understand the concept of strategy: For one player, a strategy specifies the action to be taken at ALL NODES for THAT player on the decision tree. This means it is a COMPLETE plan of action for the player.

  2. Be able to write strategies for any game given in tree form.

  3. Be able to count the total number of strategies by MULTIPLICATION.

  4. Given two strategies, one for each player, play the two against each other and come up with outcome of the game.

  5. Based on (4), be able to write down the normal form of the game, where one players strategies are listed in rows, the other player in columns and the payoffs are given in the table.