# A Formal Separation Between Strategic and Nonstrategic Behavior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Generalized dynamic cognitive hierarchy models for strategic driving behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09861/) (2021)
- [CHBench: A Cognitive Hierarchy Benchmark for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Capability of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11944/) (2025)
- [Revealed Multi-Objective Utility Aggregation in Human Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07435/) (2023)
- [ElementaryNet: A Non-Strategic Neural Network for Predicting Human Behavior in Normal-Form Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05925/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is common to make a distinction between "strategic" behavior and other forms of intentional but "nonstrategic" behavior: typically, that strategic agents model other agents while nonstrategic agents do not. However, a crisp boundary between these concepts has proven elusive. This problem is pervasive throughout the game theoretic literature on bounded rationality and particularly critical in parts of the behavioral game theory literature that make an explicit distinction between the behavior of "nonstrategic" level-0 agents and "strategic" higher-level agents (e.g., the level-k and cognitive hierarchy models). Overall, work discussing bounded rationality rarely gives clear guidance on how the rationality of nonstrategic agents must be bounded, instead typically just singling out specific decision rules (e.g., randomizing uniformly, playing toward the best case, optimizing the worst case) and informally asserting that they are nonstrategic. In this work, we propose a new, formal characterization of nonstrategic behavior. Our main contribution is to show that it satisfies two properties: (1) it is general enough to capture all purportedly "nonstrategic" decision rules of which we are aware in the behavioral game theory literature; (2) behavior that obeys our characterization is distinct from strategic behavior in a precise sense.