Games Played by Teams of Players

Abstract

We develop a general framework for analyzing games where each player is a team and members of the same team all receive the same payoff. The framework combines noncooperative game theory with collective choice theory, and is developed for both strategic form and extensive form games. We introduce the concept of team equilibrium and identify conditions under which it converges to Nash equilibrium with large teams. We identify conditions on collective choice rules such that team decisions are stochastically optimal: the probability the team chooses an action is increasing in its equilibrium expected payoff. The theory is illustrated with some binary action games. (JEL C72, D71)