A Fresh Look on the Battle of Sexes Paradigm

Abstract

If one tries to model real conflict situations with the help of non-cooperative normal form games, it may happen that strategy combinations have to be considered which are totally unrealistic in practice but which, however may be taken into account in equilibrium with positive probability. In this paper the battle of sexes paradigm is considered which is the most simple game owning this unrealistic feature. It is shown that a slight modification of the rules of this game remedies the problem: The game is repeated as long as the absurd strategy combination is realized, but at most n times. It turns out that the expected run length of this new game is smaller than two. In other words, the unrealistic feature of the original battle of sexes paradigm can be removed by a slight and in its consequences not important modification of the rules of the game.