Games MDPI

04/06/2026

📢 We’re excited to celebrate the incredible contributions of our authors in May!

Your trust and support are invaluable to us, and we truly appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with such brilliant minds.

Discover the remarkable works published last month:

Nonlinear Dynamics of Evolutionary Public Goods Games with Consistent- and Inconsistent-Moral-Standard Exclusive Sanctions
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/24

Search Costs, Hassle Costs, and Drip Pricing: Equilibria with Rational Consumers and Firms †
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/25

Diffusion Mechanism of Regional Collaborative Strategy in Public Health Emergencies Considering Vertical Intervention
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/26

When Context Shapes Preferences: Norm Erosion and Context-Dependent Fairness Concerns in Public Goods Games
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/27

A Cooperative Pollution Control Differential Game with Randomly Switching Payoffs
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/28

We study a continuous-time cooperative differential game of pollution control in which the pollution stock accumulates emissions and affects long-run welfare. The key feature is a one-time random increase in the public damage weight, interpreted as a regime shift in environmental policy, social dama...

02/06/2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming science, decision-making, and social interactions. But how do they behave in strategic environments? Can they replicate human strategic behavior, and what unique patterns emerge when humans and LLMs interact?

This Special Issue of Games welcomes submissions exploring the intersection of LLMs and game theory, including:
🔹 Agent-based strategic games
🔹 Human vs. LLM behavior comparisons
🔹 Mixed human–LLM interactions
🔹 Communication and signaling
🔹 Equilibrium selection and game design
🔹 Detection of human and AI players

Guest Editors are Dr. Andreas Duus Pape and Dr. Christopher Zosh

We invite researchers working at the crossroads of AI, economics, behavioral science, and game theory to contribute.

https://shorturl.at/Mi0YT

29/05/2026

👏 Check out our highly cited paper:

A Review of Attacker–Defender Games and Cyber Security, written by: Kjell Hausken, Jonathan W. Welburn and Jun Zhuang

📜 This review examines the historical development of attacker–defender games and highlights how game theory has shaped cyber security research, focusing on areas such as incomplete information, deterrence, resilience, deception, stochastic modeling, and cyber vulnerability management. It also identifies future research directions, including expanding transportation-based cyber security games across air, land, and sea systems and further developing educational and board-game approaches for cyber security awareness and training.

👉

The focus of this review is the long and broad history of attacker–defender games as a foundation for the narrower and shorter history of cyber security. The purpose is to illustrate the role of game theory in cyber security and which areas have received attention and to indicate future research d...

27/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/25

Search Costs, Hassle Costs, and Drip Pricing: Equilibria with Rational Consumers and Firms †, written by: Michael Baye and John Morgan

This paper examines drip pricing related to compulsory charges—a situation where firms intentionally make it costly for consumers to discover mandatory fees or surcharges that “drip” into the full (total) price, which is only revealed after incurring the hassle cost of completing a purchase. W...

20/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/24

Nonlinear Dynamics of Evolutionary Public Goods Games with Consistent- and Inconsistent-Moral-Standard Exclusive Sanctions, written by Yang Chen and Xiaofeng Wang from Donghua University

This paper investigates the evolution of public cooperation within a four-strategy public goods game that incorporates both consistently and inconsistently moralistic exclusion mechanisms. Using replicator dynamics in an infinite well-mixed population, we demonstrate that the presence of Inconsisten...

15/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/23

A Dynamic Game Model to Estimate Market Competitiveness: An Application to the Chinese Retail Oil Market, written by: Ying Zheng, Jiayi Xu and Xiao-Bing Zhang

This paper develops a dynamic game-theoretic model to evaluate market competitiveness in industries characterized by price competition and adjustment stickiness. We extend the dynamic oligopoly framework for estimating market competitiveness in the literature from a quantity-setting to a price-setti...

12/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/22

Game Theory Narratives of the Three-Body Trilogy, written by: Noemi Navarro and Jean-Christophe Pereau

This article offers a formal analysis of the paradoxes, dilemmas and strategic interactions explored in Liu Cixin’s trilogy The Three-Body Problem. Several games, such as the survival game, the deterrence game, the first contact game, and the big bang game, provide the foundations of cosmic sociology.

This article offers a formal analysis of the paradoxes, dilemmas and strategic interactions explored in Liu Cixin’s trilogy The Three-Body Problem. Several games, such as the survival game, the deterrence game, the first contact game, and the big bang game, provide the foundations of cosmic sociol...

08/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/3/21 #

Do Downstream Firms Strategically Accept Upstream Equity Participation?, written by: Chiu-Hui Li and Jen-Yao Lee from National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology

05/05/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/2/20 #

A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Approach to the Inverse Eigenvector Centrality Problem, written by: Mauro Passacantando and Fabio Raciti

30/04/2026

📢 Call for reading!

Please feel free to read our latest publication:
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/17/2/19

Monopoly and Endogenous Single Highest Quality, written by Amit Gayer from Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee

This paper analyzes a monopolistic market with a continuum of consumers in the linear case. Consumers are vertically differentiated by a one-dimensional preference for quality, and the monopolist is allowed to offer a menu of quality-price pairs. The analysis shows that, in the linear case, the mono...