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Games, Volume 16, Issue 6

2025 December - 11 articles

Cover Story: Tennis is a sport of strategy and finesse. Game theorists love it. Strategically sophisticated tennis analytics has become an integral part of match preparation, and new coaching rules turn strategies live and interactive. The tiniest advantage decides a match, and a growing analytics industry works tirelessly to give players that edge. Notwithstanding, economists have cited tennis as behavioral evidence of optimal unpredictability, beginning with an article from 2001, which analyzed a dozen famous tennis matches from a long time ago. In this article, Ben Depoorter, co-founder of the leading tennis analytics firm, teamed up with Heinrich Nax, Ivan Lendl, Miha Mlakar and Simon Jantschgi to debunk that minimax myth: even the best servers in the game are predictable under pressure. Even today, knowing that can decide between a Win or a Loss. View this paper
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Articles (11)

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,765 Views
45 Pages

9 December 2025

This paper develops a formal model to analyze how foreign interventions—via resource transfers towards mobilization, technological upgrades of the mobilization technology, and various forms of conditional aid—reshape identity choices and...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,269 Views
13 Pages

Decisions in the Basketball Endgame: A Downside of the Three-Point Revolution

  • Luka Secilmis,
  • Teo Secilmis,
  • Simon Jantschgi and
  • Heinrich H. Nax

8 December 2025

Von Neumann’s minimax theorem defines optimal strategic unpredictability in zero-sum games. Empirical evidence from professional sports has been interpreted as positive behavioral evidence for minimax. In this article, we analyze the strategic...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,367 Views
24 Pages

5 December 2025

This paper studies the influence of moral emotions and beliefs on understanding charitable giving. While specific moral emotions such as empathy, guilt, and shame have been associated with prosocial behavior, how they impact giving behavior may depen...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,128 Views
28 Pages

1 December 2025

Wisdom in negotiation is increasingly vital in managing conflicts, yet its behavioural expression remains underexplored. This study explores the behavioural signatures of individuals nominated as wise negotiators within an organisational context. The...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
925 Views
10 Pages

19 November 2025

We investigate a susceptible–exposed–infected–recovered (SEIR) epidemic model that distinguishes between two subpopulations: individuals favoring vaccination (pro-vaccination), represented by the compartments (SP,EP,IP,RP), and thos...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,347 Views
12 Pages

Minimax Under Pressure: The Case of Tennis

  • Ben Depoorter,
  • Simon Jantschgi,
  • Ivan Lendl,
  • Miha Mlakar and
  • Heinrich H. Nax

18 November 2025

A series of articles has tested von Neumann’s minimax theory against behavioral evidence based on field data from professional sports. The evidence has been viewed and collectively cited as positive evidence that elite athletes in their familiar spor...

  • Article
  • Open Access
792 Views
16 Pages

12 November 2025

Linear programming and polyhedral representation conversion methods have been widely applied to game theory to compute equilibria. Here, we introduce new applications of these methods to two game-theoretic scenarios in which players aim to secure suf...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
983 Views
22 Pages

5 November 2025

We propose a one-shot, non-cooperative mechanism that implements the core in a large class of public goods games. Players simultaneously choose conditional commitment functions, which are binding unilateral commitments that condition a player’s...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,311 Views
14 Pages

3 November 2025

This paper introduces the Bateson Game, a signaling game in which ambiguity over the governing rules of interaction (interpretive frames), rather than asymmetry of information about player types, drives strategic outcomes. We formalize the communicat...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
1,013 Views
22 Pages

22 October 2025

Classifying games according to their strategic properties provides meaningful insights into the motivations driving the interacting parties, suggests possible future trajectories, and in some cases also points to potential interventions aiming to inf...

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Games - ISSN 2073-4336