Using a TV Game Show to Explain the Concept of a Dominant Strategy

Abstract

An introduction to game theory is now a standard part of the undergraduate economics curriculum. To the best of my knowledge, all current intermediate microeconomics textbooks contain a discussion of game theory, as do the vast majority of introductory texts. One concept important to basic game theory is that of a dominant strategy. A game player has a dominant strategy when one of the actions available to him or her always leaves the player better off (or at least no worse off) than would any of the other possible actions, no matter what decisions are made by the other player(s) in the game. An informal survey of microeconomics textbooks shows how regularly the concept of a dominant strategy appears. I checked 9 intermediate textbooks (with copyright dates of 1994 or later), and every one of them defines and discusses a dominant strategy. In addition, 20 out of 25 introductory textbooks (with the same copyright dates) either explicitly define the term (14 cases) or clearly describe the characteristics.