Repeated Games and Reputations: Long-Run Relationships » (1st Edition)

George J. Mailath (Ph. D., Princeton University) is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Larry Samuelson (Ph. D., University of Illinois) is the Antoine Augustin Cournot Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin.

Personalized and continuing relationships play a central role in any society. Economists have built upon the theories of repeated games and reputations to make important advances in understanding such relationships. Repeated Games and Reputations begins with a careful development of the fundamental concepts in these theories, including the notions of a repeated game, strategy, and equilibrium. Mailath and Samuelson then present the classic folk theorem and reputation results for games of perfect and imperfect public monitoring, with the benefit of the modern analytical tools of decomposability and self-generation. They also present more recent developments, including results beyond folk theorems and recent work in games of private monitoring and alternative approaches to reputations. Repeated Games and Reputations synthesizes and unifies the vast body of work in this area, bringing the reader to the research frontier. Detailed arguments and proofs are given throughout, interwoven with examples, discussions of how the theory is to be used in the study of relationships, and economic applications. The book will be useful to those doing basic research in the theory of repeated games and reputations as well as those using these tools in more applied research.

1. Introduction
PART I. Games with Perfect Monitoring
2. The Basic Structure of Repeated Games with Perfect Monitoring
3. The Folk Theorem with Perfect Monitoring
4. How Long Is Forever?
5. Variations on the Game
6. Applications
PART II. Games with (Imperfect) Public Monitoring
7. The Basic Structure of Repeated Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring
8. Bounding Perfect Public Equilibrium Payoffs
9. The Folk Theorem with Imperfect Public Monitoring
10. Private Strategies in Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring
11. Applications
PART III. Games with Private Monitoring
12. Private Monitoring
13. Almost Public Monitoring Games
14. Belief-Free Equilibria in Private Monitoring Games
PART IV. Reputations
15. Reputations with Short-Lived Players
16. Reputations with Long-Lived Players
17. Finitely Repeated Games
18. Modeling Reputations