Geb Tables Figures

---
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."
category: general-purpose
source_repo: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills
source_path: "Games-and-Economic-Behavior-Skills/skills/geb-tables-figures/SKILL.md"
source_url: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/Games-and-Economic-Behavior-Skills/skills/geb-tables-figures/SKILL.md
---


# 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
```

---

**Source:** [`brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills`](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) → `Games-and-Economic-Behavior-Skills/skills/geb-tables-figures/SKILL.md`