Dominant Strategy Finder

About this calculator

In game theory, a strategy is dominant if it gives a player a better payoff than their alternative strategy no matter what the opponent does. For a 2×2 game, this calculator compares the row player's payoffs for each of their two strategies against both possible moves by the column player: if one row strategy yields a higher payoff than the other in both columns, it strictly dominates and a rational player should always choose it.

Economists, game theorists, and students use dominant strategy analysis as the first and simplest step in solving a game, because a dominant strategy lets a player ignore what the opponent might do entirely and removes a layer of strategic uncertainty. It's the foundation for concepts like the Prisoner's Dilemma, where each player has a dominant strategy that, followed by both, leads to a worse joint outcome than if they'd cooperated — and it's also the first check performed before searching for a more general Nash equilibrium in games without a dominant strategy.