Dual reduction and elementary games

Consider the incentive constraints that define the correlated equilibria of a game. The duals of these linear constraints generate Markov chains on the players' strategy sets. The stationary distributions for these Markov chains can be interpreted as the strategies in a reduced game, which is called a dual reduction. Any equilibrium of a dual reduction is an equilibrium of the original game. We say that a game is elementary if all incentive constraints can be satisfied as strict inequalities in a correlated equilibrium. Any game can be reduced to an elementary game by iterative dual reduction. (C) 1997 Academic Press.