Rationalizability in general situations

The main purpose of this paper is to present an analytical framework that can be used to study rationalizable strategic behavior in general situations—i.e., arbitrary strategic games with various modes of behavior. We show that, under mild conditions, the notion of rationalizability defined in general situations has nice properties similar to those in finite games. The major features of this paper are (1) our approach does not require any kind of technical assumptions on the structure of the game, and (2) the analytical framework provides a unified treatment of players’ general preferences, including expected utility as a special case. In this paper, we also investigate the relationship between rationalizability and Nash equilibrium in general games.