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The folk theorem with imperfect public information. (English) Zbl 0819.90137

Summary: We study repeated games in which players observe a public outcome that imperfectly signals the actions played. We provide conditions guaranteeing that any feasible, individually rational payoff vector of the stage game can arise as a perfect equilibrium of the repeated game with sufficiently little discounting. The central condition requires that there exist action profiles with the property that, for any two players, no two deviations – one by each player – give rise to the same probability distribution over public outcomes. The results apply to principal-agent, partnership, oligopoly, and mechanism-design models, and to one-shot games with transferable utilities.

MSC:

91A20 Multistage and repeated games
91B44 Economics of information