Interactive Epistemology and Reasoning: On the Foundations of Game Theory

This PhD thesis is about epistemic game theory, which is a field that studies how people reason about their opponents before making a decision. So we are interested in what is going on in a person’s mind before he comes to choose. The analysis consists of two steps: First we try to describe the person’s way of reasoning by means of a formal mathematical model. Then, we ask which patterns of reasoning seem reasonable, and try to find out the choices that can be made under such natural ways of reasoning. The field of epistemic game theory is thus on the interface between psychology, philosophy, mathematics, economics, and decision theory.