Ordinal payoffs are numbers representing the outcomes of a game where the value of the numbers is not important, but only the ordering of numbers.
For example, when solving for a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies, one is only concerned with whether one payoff is larger than
another - the degree of the difference is not important. Thus, we can assign values like "1" for the worst outcome, "2" for the next best, and so on. Thus, ordinal payoffs simply rank all of the outcomes.
For mixed strategy calculations, cardinal payoffs must be employed.
updated: 15 August 2005
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