A Game-Theoretic Approach to Catching a Cheating Spouse

Abstract

In this paper, we study a game model of marital cheating. The husband is the cheater and the wife is faithful. The husband’s cheating is either open or surreptitious. The wife can either ignore the cheating or catch her husband in the act of cheating. We first express the game of interest in matrix form. Second, we determine the best response functions of the two players. Third, we show that there exists a unique mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in the game. Finally, we demonstrate the nexus between our marital cheating game and the prominent Matching Pennies game.