A Characterization of Strategic Complementarities

I characterize games for which there is an order on strategies such that the game has strategic complementarities. I prove that, with some qualifications, games with a unique equilibrium have complementarities if and only if Cournot best-response dynamics has no cycles; and that all games with multiple equilibria have complementarities. This is a negative result because it implies that the predictive power of complementarities alone is very weak. As an application of my results I show that generic 2 X 2 games either have no pure-strategy equilibria, or are GSC