geb-tables-figures

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