Repeated Games with Long-run and Short-run Players

Abstract

This paper studies the set of equilibrium payoffs in repeated games with long- and short-run players and little discounting. Because the short-run players are unconcerned about the future, each equilibrium outcome is constrained to lie on their static reaction (best-response) curves. The natural extension of the folk theorem to games of this sort would simply include this constraint in the definitions of the feasible payoffs and minmax values. In fact, this extension does obtain under the assumption that each player's choice of a mixed strategy for the stage game is publicly observable but, in contrast to standard repeated games, the set of equilibrium payoffs is different if players can observe only their opponents' realized actions.