Exploration of misperceptions in hypergames

This paper studies adversarial scenarios within the framework of hypergames, where rational players have misperceptions about the game they are involved in. We introduce the notion of inconsistent equilibrium to capture those equilibria of the hypergame that are not perceived by at least one player as an equilibrium in her own game. We identify a class of actions, termed exploratory, that a player can take from an inconsistent equilibrium to improve her payoff (even though such actions are perceived to be sanctioned by other players). We analyze the asymptotic convergence properties of the resulting dynamical system and characterize to what extent misperception can be decreased by the use of exploratory actions.