Ternary choices in repeated games and border collision bifurcations

Abstract Several recent contributions formalize and analyze binary choices games with externalities as those described by Schelling. Nevertheless, in the real world choices are not always binary, and players have often to decide among more than two alternatives. These kinds of interactions are examined in game theory where, starting from the well known rock-paper-scissor game, several other kinds of strategic interactions involving more than two choices are examined. In this paper we investigate how the dynamics evolve introducing one more option in binary choice games with externalities. The dynamics we obtain are always in a stable regime, that is, the structurally stable dynamics are only attracting cycles, but of any possible positive integer as period. We show that, depending on the structure of the game, the dynamics can be quite different from those existing when considering binary choices. The bifurcation structure, due to border collisions, is explained, showing the existence of so-called big-bang bifurcation points.