Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory --- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past --- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with...

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...

We study the intergenerational accumulation of knowledge in an infinite-horizon model of communication. Each in a sequence of players receives an informative but imperfect signal of the once-and-for-all realization of an unobserved state. The state affects all players' preferences over present...

This paper studies the role of memory and communication in games between ongoing organizations. In each organization, each individual, upon entry into the game, replaces his predecessor who has the same preferences and faces the same strategic possibilities. Entry across distinct organizations...

We ask whether communication can directly substitute for memory in dynastic repeated games in which short lived individuals care about the utility of their offspring who replace them in an infinitely repeated game. Each individual is unable to observe what happens before his entry in the game....

This paper examines alternative ways to prevent losses from bank insolvencies. It is widely viewed that transparency in reporting bank balance sheets is a key element in reducing such losses. It is, however, unclear just how such transparency would be achieved. Current approaches to avoiding...

We analyze "dynastic" repeated games. A stage game is repeatedly played by successive generations of finitely-lived players with dynastic preferences. Each individual has preferences that replicate those of the infinitely-lived players of a standard discounted infinitely-repeated game. When all...

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We study properties of dynamic enfranchisement games, dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time....

This paper examines the Faustian dynamics of policy and power. We posit a general class of dynamic games in which current policies affect the future distribution of political power, resulting in the following "Faustian trade off": if the current ruler chooses his preferred policy, he then...

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country's relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare...