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Repeated Games: Cooperation and Rationality

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Abstract

The paper is a survey written for the Sixth World congress of the Econometric Society. It is devoted largely to a discussion of the progress made in the last decade in understanding the structure of self-enforcing agreements in discounted supergames of complete information. Perfect and imperfect monitoring models are considered in turn, with attention given to the case of substantial impatience as well as to the various "folk theorems." The emphasis is on the features of constrained-optimal perfect equilibria, causes of inefficiency, and some relationships among different strands of the literature. The remainder of the paper is a critical and comparative consideration of recent work on renegotiation in repeated games.

Suggested Citation

  • David G. Pearce, 1991. "Repeated Games: Cooperation and Rationality," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 983, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:983
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Garey Ramey & Joel Watson, 1999. "Conditioning Institutions and Renegotiation," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1225, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Repeated game; self-enforcing contracts; supergames; folk theorem;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C71 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Cooperative Games

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