Disappearing private reputations in long-run relationships

For games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring, Cripps et al. [Imperfect monitoring and impermanent reputations, Econometrica 72 (2004) 407–432] showed that an informed player facing short-lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types. This paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long-lived and has private beliefs, so that the informed player's reputation is private. The rate at which reputations disappear is uniform across equilibria and reputations also disappear in sufficiently long discounted finitely repeated games

Your reputation is who you're not, not who you'd like to be

corporate image;incomplete information

Who wants a good reputation?

moral hazard;quality;corporate image

Sunk investments lead to unpredictable prices

investment;prices;competitiveness;trade

Contemporaneous perfect Epsilon-equilibria

game theory;equilibrium analysis

Disappearing private reputations in long-run relationships.

For games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring, Cripps et al. [Imperfect monitoring and impermanent reputations, Econometrica 72 (2004) 407–432] showed that an informed player facing short-lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types. This paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long-lived and has private beliefs, so that the informed player's reputation is private. The rate at which reputations disappear is uniform across equilibria and reputations also disappear in sufficiently long discounted finitely repeated games.

Infinite Coordination Games

We investigate the prescriptive power of sequential iterated admissibility in coordination games of the Gale-Stewart style, i.e., perfectinformation games of infinite duration with only two payoffs. We show that, on this kind of games, the procedure of eliminating weakly dominated strategies is independent of the elimination order and that, under maximal simultaneous elimination, the procedure converges after at most ω many stages.

The Cognitive Origins of Social Stratification

In evolutionary psychology, cultural phenomena are explained with reference to evolved psychological processes. This paper presents an economic approach to explore this link by demonstrating how social stratification can arise in game-playing populations as a result of social categorisation of and inference from arbitrary agent traits. The computer simulation of the model demonstrates that agents' increasing ability to categorise opponents in the chicken game generates an increasing number of social groups whose members share commonality of fate both in terms of opponent behaviour and payoff levels. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006social cognition, social stratification, categorisation, chicken game,