We investigate whether two players in a long-run relationship can maintain cooperation when the details of the underlying game are unknown. Specifically, we consider a new class of repeated games with private monitoring, where an unobservable state of the world influences the payoff functions...

This paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long-run player whose choice of stage-game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents. The authors obtain lower and upper bounds on the long-run player's payoff in any Nash equilibrium of the game. If the long-run player's...

Imagine that one player, the "incumbent," competes with several "entrants." Each entrant competes only with the incumbent, but obs erves play in all contests. Previous work shows that as more and more entrants are added, the incumbent's reputation may dominate play of the game, if the entrants...