A fundamental non-stationarity of infinitely repeated games as usually studied is that the length of the history of play gets longer each period. With private actions (and mixed strategies) or private signals, this introduces a particular difficulty with common solution concepts such as...

This study uses John Rawls' behind-the-veil of ignorance device as a fairness criterion to evaluate social policies and applies it to a contracting model in which the terms equality of opportunity and equality of result are well defined. The results suggest that fairness and inequality-even...

This paper presents a government debt game with the property that if the timing of debt auctions within a period is sufficiently unfettered, the set of equilibrium outcome paths of real economic variables given the government has access to a rich debt structure is identical to the set of...

This study argues that both unequal opportunity and social mobility are necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives must be provided.

This paper develops new recursive methods for studying stationary sequential equilibria in games with private monitoring. We first consider games where play has occurred forever into the past and develop methods for analyzing a large class of stationary strategies, where the main restriction is...

This paper presents a simple model of government reputation which captures two characteristics of policy outcomes in less developed countries: governments which betray public trust do so erratically, and, after a betrayal, public trust is regained only gradually.

This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

This paper develops new recursive, set based methods for studying repeated games with private monitoring. For any finite-state strategy profile, we find necessary and sufficient conditions for whether there exists a distribution over initial states such that the strategy, together with this...