Stochastic Games With Hidden States, Fourth Version

This paper studies infinite-horizon stochastic games in which players observe payoffs and noisy public information about a hidden state each period.We find that, very generally, the feasible and individually rational payoff set is invariant to the initial prior about the state in the limit as the discount factor goes to one. This result ensures that players can punish or reward the opponents via continuation payoffs in a flexible way. Then we prove the folk theorem, assuming that public randomization is available. The proof is constructive, and introduces the idea of random blocks to design an effective punishment mechanism.

Download Paper

Paper Number
16-012
Year
2016
Authored by