Reputation in continuous-time games

We study reputation dynamics in continuous-time games in which a large player (e.g., government) faces a population of small players (e.g., households) and the large player's actions are imperfectly observable. The major part of our analysis examines the case in which public signals about the l...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Sannikov, Yuliy, EDUARDO FAINGOLD
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:Brasil
Institución:Instituição de Ensino Superior e de Pesquisa (INSPER)
Repositorio:Repositório Institucional da INSPER
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.insper.edu.br:11224/4877
Acceso en línea:https://repositorio.insper.edu.br/handle/11224/4877
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Reputation
Repeated games
Incomplete information
Continuous time
Descripción
Sumario:We study reputation dynamics in continuous-time games in which a large player (e.g., government) faces a population of small players (e.g., households) and the large player's actions are imperfectly observable. The major part of our analysis examines the case in which public signals about the large player's actions are distorted by a Brownian motion and the large player is either a normal type, who plays strategically, or a behavioral type, who is committed to playing a stationary strategy. We obtain a clean characterization of sequential equilibria using ordinary differential equations and identify general conditions for the sequential equilibrium to be unique and Markovian in the small players' posterior belief. We find that a rich equilibrium dynamics arises when the small players assign positive prior probability to the behavioral type. By contrast, when it is common knowledge that the large player is the normal type, every public equilibrium of the continuous-time game is payoff-equivalent to one in which a static Nash equilibrium is played after every history. Finally, we examine variations of the model with Poisson signals and multiple behavioral types.