Theoretical Economics

Journal of the Econometric Society

Edited by: Federico Echenique • ISSN (e): 1555-7561 • ISSN (print): 1933-6837

Theoretical Economics: Aug, 2019, Volume 14, Issue 3

Stochastic games with hidden states

https://doi.org/10.3982/TE3068
p. 1115-1167

Yuichi Yamamoto

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 uses the idea of random blocks to design an effective punishment mechanism.


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