ABSTRACT
Among all the thousands of strategic games discovered and investigated since the early development of game theory in the 1920s, especially after the publication of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s (1944) landmark book Games and Economic Behavior, the Centipede game stands out as perhaps the most perplexing and paradoxical of them all. Rosenthal (1981) introduced it as an incidental comment (pp. 96-97) in a discussion of an entirely different game (the Chain-Store game). Binmore (1987) first named the Centipede game in print after the passing resemblance of its game tree to a multi-legged insect, as can be seen in Figure 11.1, where Rosenthal’s original version of the game is depicted.
