Non-cooperative game theory

In game theory, a non-cooperative game is a game with competition between individual players and in which only self-enforcing (e.g. through credible threats) alliances (or competition between groups of players, called "coalitions") are possible due to the absence of external means to enforce cooperative behavior (e.g. contract law), as opposed to cooperative games.

Non-cooperative games are generally analysed through the framework of non-cooperative game theory, which tries to predict players' individual strategies and payoffs and to find Nash equilibria. It is opposed to cooperative game theory which focuses on predicting which coalitions will form, the joint actions that groups take and the resulting collective payoffs and does not analyze the strategic bargaining that occurs within each coalition and affects the distribution of payoffs between members of a same coalition.

Non-cooperative game theory provides a low-level approach as it models all the procedural details of the game, whereas cooperative game theory only describes the structure, strategies and payoffs of coalitions. As non-cooperative game theory is more general than cooperative games, cooperative games can be analyzed using the terms of non-cooperative game theory (the converse does not hold) provided that sufficient assumptions are made to encompass all the possible strategies available to players due to the possibility of external enforcement of cooperation. While it would thus be optimal to have all games expressed under a non-cooperative framework, in many instances insufficient information is available to accurately model the formal procedures available to the players during the strategic bargaining process, or the resulting model would be of too high complexity to offer a practical tool in the real world. In such cases, cooperative game theory provides a simplified approach that allows to analyze the game at large without having to make any assumption about bargaining powers.

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