Game Theory Editing and Proofreading Services

Players are assumed to have common knowledge of rationality, symmetric information, and unlimited computational capacity, and to move simultaneously. Then the equilibrium is derived and the paper draws a conclusion about how firms bid, or how nations deter, or how people cooperate. The equilibrium is correct. Whether it says anything about firms, nations or people depends on four claims made in a sentence and never examined again.

We edit what game theorists write — model setups and equilibrium derivations, mechanism design and auction papers, repeated game and reputation work, bargaining and coalition models, evolutionary and behavioural game theory, experimental papers testing predictions, applications to industrial organisation, politics and biology, and theses, working papers and referee responses. Our editors work on the assumptions read as claims about behaviour.

A game-theoretic paper's assumptions are substantive claims about how players think, and the failure is a setup written as though they were bookkeeping. Each assumption asserts something a real player might not do, and the reader needs to see which ones are load-bearing. We work through these so each assumption is stated with the behavioural claim it makes, since "common knowledge of rationality" asserts that every player believes every other player will not blunder, and knows they believe it; so the timing and information structure are described as what players observe and when, because simultaneous and sequential move versions of the same story are different games and the story rarely settles which; so the equilibrium concept is justified rather than adopted, given that refinements do real work and a reader wants to know why this one; so the assumptions the result depends on are separated from those made for closed form, as a result surviving the removal of a symmetry assumption is a stronger result; so multiplicity is confronted where it exists, since a paper reporting one of several equilibria has made a selection and should say on what grounds; so the intuition is given as a story about players' incentives before the proof; and so the application's fit is argued rather than assumed. Papers written this way get applied by people outside the field.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including working papers and unpublished results. We are editors rather than game theorists, and we offer no view on models, equilibria or applications. What we can do is make the assumptions read as the claims they are.