Common belief and common knowledge

Spyros Vassilakis*, Shmuel Zamir

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the universal belief space [Mertens and Zamir (1985)] which incorporated all situations of incomplete information concerning a state space S, we define a 'knowledge operator' in terms of beliefs. From this operator we derive (in the usual way) the concept of common knowledge and the result is: An event E is common knowledge if and only if it is a belief subspace. Recalling that any game model, with complete or incomplete information, is a belief subspace, this result may be regarded as a considerable weakening of the common knowledge assumption that is: If we adopt the universal belief space as a general framework model for incomplete information games, then the statement 'the game (i.e. the belief subspace) is Common Knowledge' is a formal provable statement within the model. Since a belief subspace may or may not be consistent (in Harsanyi's sense), it follows that with this definition, and unlike in Aumann's model, players may agree to disagree.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)495-505
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Mathematical Economics
Volume22
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 1993

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Common belief and common knowledge'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this