Download This PaperThe Poker-Litigation Game
Resolved: Journal for Alternative Dispute Resolution, vol. 5, no. 1 (2015), pp. 144-164.
17 Pages Posted: 26 Dec 2012 Last revised: 26 Jan 2015
Date Written: January 25, 2015
Abstract
Is civil and criminal litigation a search for truth, like science or philosophy, or a game of skill and luck, like the game of poker? Although the process of litigation has been modeled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, as a War of Attrition, as a Game of Chicken, and even as a simple coin toss, no one has formally modeled litigation as a game of poker. This paper is the first to do so. Specifically, we present a simple “poker-litigation game” and find the optimal strategy for playing this game.
Keywords: poker, poker-litigation game, best response, Nash equilibrium, incomplete information, low and high bets, mixed strategy, probabilistic strategy, strategic game, symmetry
JEL Classification: C72, C73, K41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation