Author(s)

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal^1*, Hamid Beladi²

¹Department of Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA.
²Department of Economics, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA.

In this note we analyze a game of marital infidelity. The husband can either be faithful to or cheat on his wife. The wife can either monitor or not monitor her husband. We first determine the best response correspondences of the two players. Second, we explain why there is no pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in the game under study. Third, we show that there exists a unique mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in the game. Finally, we demonstrate the nexus between our marital infidelity game and the prominent Matching Pennies game.

Cheating, Faithfulness, Monitoring, Mixed-Strategy, Static Game

Batabyal, A. and Beladi, H. (2017) Cheating on Your Spouse: A Game-Theoretic Analysis. Theoretical Economics Letters, 7, 79-85. doi: 10.4236/tel.2017.71008.