Reputation without Commitment in Finitely-repeated Games
نویسندگان
چکیده
In the reputation literature, players have commitment types which represent the possibility that they do not have standard payoffs but instead are constrained to follow a particular plan. In this paper, we show that arbitrary commitment types can emerge from incomplete information about the stage payoffs. In particular, any finitely repeated game with commitment types is strategically equivalent to a standard finitely repeated game with incomplete information about the stage payoffs. Then, classic reputation results can be achieved with uncertainty concerning only the stage payoffs. JEL Numbers: C72, C73.
منابع مشابه
Reputation without Commitment
In the reputation literature, players have commitment types which represent the possibility that they do not have standard payoffs but instead are constrained to follow a particular plan. In this paper, we show that arbitrary commitment types can emerge from incomplete information about the stage payoffs. In particular, any finitely repeated game with commitment types is strategically equivalen...
متن کاملCooperation without Reputation: Experimental Evidence from Prisoner's Dilemma Games
This paper investigates cooperative play in prisoner’s dilemma games by designing an experiment to evaluate the ability of two leading theories of observed cooperation: reputation building and altruism. We analyze both one-shot and finitely repeated games to gauge the importance of these theories. We conclude that neither altruism nor reputation building alone can explain our observations. The ...
متن کاملPlay It Again: Partner Choice, Reputation Building and Learning in Restarting, Finitely-repeated Dilemma Games
Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such experience would affect play of subsequent finitely-repeated games remains unclear. In each of six treatment...
متن کاملReputation without Commitment in Finitely-repeated Games —online Appendix Jonathan Weinstein and Muhamet Yildiz
The strategic equivalence above implies that the testable predictions with or without commitment types are nearly indistinguishable. Imagine that an empirical or experimental researcher observes outcomes of games that essentially look like a fixed repeated game, as in g∗, but she does not know the players’beliefs about possible commitments or payoff variations. Using the data, she can obtain an...
متن کاملCommitment games
This paper explores how the ability to commit in games affect equilibrium payoffs. More precisely, we consider two-stage games, called commitment games, in which players can commit to some of their strategies in the first stage, and play the game induced by their commitment in the second stage. We completely characterize equilibrium payoffs of commitment games. Among others, we show that the po...
متن کامل