This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

Monetary theorists have advanced an intriguing notion: we exchange money to make up for a lack of enforcement, when it is difficult to monitor and sanction opportunistic behaviors. We demonstrate that, in fact, monetary equilibrium cannot generally be sustained when monitoring and punishment...

In a Bertrand-oligopoly experiment, firms choose whether or not to engage in cartel-like communication and, if so, they may get fined by a cartel authority. We find that four-firm industries form cartels more often than duopolies because they gain less from a hysteresis effect after cartel...

We explore whether lawful cooperation in buyer groups facilitates collusion in the product market. Buyer groups purchase inputs more economically. In a repeated game, abandoning the buyer group altogether or excluding single firms constitute credible threats. Hence, in theory, buyer groups...

Studies of cooperation in infinitely repeated matching games focus on homogeneous economies, where full cooperation is efficient and any defection is collectively sanctioned. Here we study heterogeneous economies where occasional defections are part of efficient play, and show how to support...

I study the path properties of adaptive heuristics that mimic the natural dynamics of play in a game and converge to the set of correlated equilibria. Despite their apparent differences, I show that these heuristics have an abstract representation as a sequence of probability distributions that...

As the Copenhagen Accord indicates, most of the international community agrees that global mean temperature should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels to avoid unacceptable damages from climate change. The scientific evidence distilled in the Fourth...

We show that, in a multi-agent contract setting, the principal can effectively rule out tacit collusion among agents (i.e., “bad” equilibrium) by posting permanent job openings to an external labor market. That is, a simple “market-like” employment mechanism can yield collusion-proof...

In contrast to the existing literature on repeated games that assumes a fixed discount factor, I study an environment in which it is more realistic to assume a fluctuating discount factor. In a repeated oligopoly, as the interest rate changes, so too does the degree to which firms discount the...