Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Individual preference and individual choice
- 2 Individual preference and social choice
- 3 Basic theory of noncooperative games
- 4 Elections and two-person zero-sum games
- 5 Nonzero-sum games: political economy, public goods, and the prisoners' dilemma
- 6 Institutions, strategic voting, and agendas
- 7 Cooperative games and the characteristic function
- 8 The core
- 9 Solution theory
- 10 Repeated games and information: some research frontiers
- References and a guide to the literature
- Index
10 - Repeated games and information: some research frontiers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Individual preference and individual choice
- 2 Individual preference and social choice
- 3 Basic theory of noncooperative games
- 4 Elections and two-person zero-sum games
- 5 Nonzero-sum games: political economy, public goods, and the prisoners' dilemma
- 6 Institutions, strategic voting, and agendas
- 7 Cooperative games and the characteristic function
- 8 The core
- 9 Solution theory
- 10 Repeated games and information: some research frontiers
- References and a guide to the literature
- Index
Summary
No matter what theorems we prove and what empirical support we muster, Chapter 9 suggests that solution theory will retain some ad hoc quality unless we can relate it to an extensive-form model of cooperation. Ultimately, we want to rationalize solution theory by appealing directly to assumptions about individual rationality and utility maximization, and not to coalition formation hypotheses. Although this is a goal that solution theory does not meet today, researchers have taken some cautious first steps toward that goal, and this chapter reviews some of them.
Since these steps are research on the frontier, the parts of this chapter are not necessarily well integrated. First, we look at the prisoners’ dilemma when the same persons play it successively. Because there is a significant experimental literature that reports the emergence of cooperative action in repeated prisoners’ dilemma games, the analysis of this game might yield some insight into how cooperation can arise in general and how people can sustain it in the absence of formal enforcement mechanisms.
Although the analysis of repeated games helps us to understand cooperation in politics, we must consider another complication. Chapter 4 analyzed elections with incomplete information and showed how a succession of polls can yield outcomes that are identical to those that we would predict if information is complete. Chapter 5 considered the voting calculus in a simple election if voters do not know the costs of voting for other citizens. And Chapter 6 examined voting under binary agendas with incomplete information. The treatment of incomplete information in sequential games is even more complex than the preceding “simple” formulations.
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- Information
- Game Theory and Political TheoryAn Introduction, pp. 441 - 484Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986