Equilibrium in justifiable strategies: A model of reason-based choice in extensive-form games

I explore the idea that people care about the justifiability of their decisions in the context of two-person extensive games. Each player justifies his strategy s with a belief b of the opponent's strategy, which is consistent with the play path and maximally plausible (according to some exogenous criterion). We say that s is justifiable if against the ex post criticism that some other strategy s′ outperforms s against b, the player can argue that playing s′ would have exposed him to similar criticism in the opposite direction. Under a simplicity-based plausibility criterion, this concept implies systematic departures from maximizing behaviour in familiar games.