| name | geb-tables-figures |
| description | Use when building exhibits for a Games and Economic Behavior (GEB) manuscript — payoff matrices, extensive-form game trees, equilibrium/result tables, and experimental plots. Makes strategic structure and results readable to a game-theory audience. |
Tables & Figures (geb-tables-figures)
When to trigger
- A game's structure is described in prose instead of shown as a tree or matrix
- A results/comparison table is dense or hard to map to the theorems
- Experimental plots do not show convergence, distributions, or uncertainty clearly
- You are preparing exhibits for the elsarticle-formatted version
What exhibits do at GEB
GEB papers are game-theoretic, so the most valuable exhibits make strategic structure and formal results instantly legible to a specialist reader. Figures and tables should let the Editor in Charge and referees verify the setup and see the result without re-deriving it. Format note: the published format is elsarticle (elsarticle-num citations), and both LaTeX and Word are accepted at submission — but exhibits should be print-clear and self-contained regardless of stage.
Exhibit types and standards
Game representations
- Normal-form payoff matrices — clean, labeled players/strategies; mark equilibria explicitly.
- Extensive-form trees — show information sets, action labels, and payoff vectors at leaves; use
tikz for crisp vector output.
- Mechanism / timing diagrams — stages, messages, and the order of moves where relevant.
Result exhibits
- Theorem/assumption maps — a table relating assumptions to which results use them, so generality is visible at a glance.
- Comparison tables — your result versus the nearest prior results (assumptions, class of games, what is proved).
- Equilibrium tables — for worked examples, list strategies and payoffs; consistent with the solver output.
Experimental exhibits
- Distributions of play and convergence-over-rounds plots; show the equilibrium prediction as a reference line.
- Treatment comparisons with uncertainty shown (CIs or session-level scatter); cluster-aware.
- Avoid chartjunk (no 3D, minimal color); vector output (PDF/EPS) for print.
Standards (all exhibits)
- Self-contained notes: a reader understands the exhibit without hunting through the text.
- Numbered, called out in order, and tied to the specific theorem or hypothesis they support.
- Notation in exhibits matches the body exactly.
- Legible at print size; equilibria/key cells visually flagged.
Worked micro-example: a payoff-matrix caption
- Before: "Table 1. The stage game." — a referee must reread Section 2 to
decode rows, columns, and which cells matter.
- After: "Table 1. Stage-game payoffs (row player first). Boldface cells are
the two pure-strategy Nash equilibria; the starred cell is the risk-dominant
one selected by Theorem 1." — the caption now says which equilibria exist,
how they are marked, and which result the table supports.
Game trees get the same upgrade: say what the dashed information sets encode
and which subgame the accompanying proposition solves.
Referee expectations at GEB (exhibit-level)
- Equilibrium verifiability: a referee may recompute a finite example's
equilibria (e.g., in Gambit); the matrix or tree must carry every payoff
needed to do so.
- Assumption traceability: an assumption-to-theorem map is the cheapest
answer to "which results survive if Assumption 3 is dropped" — a standard
GEB generality probe.
- Session-level honesty: pooling over sessions without showing session
scatter invites an immediate clustering objection; sessions, not subjects,
are the independent unit in interactive games.
- Print discipline: elsarticle typesetting punishes wide matrices; split a
large game into per-subgame panels rather than shrinking fonts.
Anti-patterns
- A complex extensive-form game described only in words
- A payoff matrix that does not mark the equilibria
- Experimental bar charts hiding session-level variation and uncertainty
- Tables whose symbols differ from the body's notation
- Color-only encodings that fail in grayscale print
Exhibit pass for Games and Economic Behavior
Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the primitives, equilibrium concept, comparative statics, and proof or experiment boundary; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: game theorists who ask what the model teaches beyond a clever example.
- Do the pass: For every table or figure, state the estimand or object, sample or case base, uncertainty display, and one sentence the exhibit proves for the venue audience.
- Return a ledger: give
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
- Sibling guard: compare against JET for theory abstraction, Theoretical Economics for compact theory contribution, Experimental Economics for experiment-first designs; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
- Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's
resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.
Output format
【Game shown】matrix / tree / mechanism diagram present where needed? [Y/N]
【Equilibria flagged】[Y/N]
【Assumption→result map】present? [Y/N]
【Experimental plots】distributions + convergence + uncertainty? [Y/N / NA]
【Self-contained notes】[Y/N] 【Notation matches body】[Y/N]
【Next step】geb-writing-style
