We consider a market with "red" and "green" workers, where labels are payoff irrelevant. Workers may acquire skills. Skilled workers search for vacancies, while firms search for workers. A unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant. There are also asymmetric equilibria in...

We study the long-run sustainability of reputations in games with imperfect public monitoring. It is impossible to maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that does not play an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty about types. Thus, a player cannot indefinitely sustain a...

We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We show that when each agent's signal space is finite, the agents will commonly learn...

This paper surveys work on reputations in repeated games of incomplete information. We first develop the adverse-selection approach to reputations in the context of a long-lived player, who may be a “normal†type or one of a number of “commitment†types, and who faces a...

This paper surveys work on reputations in repeated games of incomplete information. We first develop the adverse-selection approach to reputations in the context of a long-lived player, who may be a “normal” type or one of a number of “commitment” types, and who faces a succession of...