Experimental Investigations of Infinitely Repeated Games

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A large variety of social settings involve people repeatedly interacting with each other in the same strategic situation.. For example, firms play repeated games when competing, nations repeatedly interact on the international stage, and workers and employees repeatedly interact in the workplace. These repeated games have been analyzed by game theorists, who have developed a broad range of predictions. This project uses laboratory experiments to answer a series of questions about how well those theories predict actual behavior in controlled strategic settings.The first set of experiments examine how to infer strategies by observing decisions made by a specific participant. The second set investigates the role of renegotiation proofness in equilibrium selection. The third group of experiments test the ability of subjects to support cooperative outcomes when they interact in multiple domains at the same time. The last project tests a widely made assertion that participants play the same way in infinitely repeated games with discounting and in randomly terminated games.The project is intrinsically interdisciplinary, because the game theory methods and ideas being tested with the experiments are widely used in economics, political science, management, psychology, and sociology. The PI will be integrating this research effort into both graduate and undergraduate classes.