The paper examines the behaviour of "evolutionary" models with epsilon-noise like those which have been used recently to discuss the evolution of social conventions. The paper is built around two main observations: that the "long run stochastic stability" of a convention is related to the speed...

This paper considers the repeated prisoner's dilemma in a large-population random-matching setting where players are unable to recognize their opponents. Despite the informational restrictions, cooperation is still a sequential equilibrium supported by 'contagious' punishments. The equilibrium...

This paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long-run player whose choice of stage-game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents. The authors obtain lower and upper bounds on the long-run player's payoff in any Nash equilibrium of the game. If the long-run player's...

Imagine that one player, the "incumbent," competes with several "entrants." Each entrant competes only with the incumbent, but obs erves play in all contests. Previous work shows that as more and more entrants are added, the incumbent's reputation may dominate play of the game, if the entrants...