Repeated Games with Incomplete Information

During the height of the Cold War, between 1965 and 1968, Robert Aumann, MichaelMaschler, and Richard Stearns collaborated on research on the dynamics of arms control negotiationsthat has since become foundational to work on repeated games. These five seminal papers arecollected here for the first time, with the addition of "postscripts" describing many of thedevelopments since the papers were written. The basic model studied throughout the book is one inwhich players ignorant about the game being played must learn what they can from the actions of theothers.The original work, done under contract to the United States Arms Control and DisarmamentAgency, was intended to tackle the gradual disarmament problem, in which neither player knew whathis own payoff would be for any given agreement, because of uncertainty about the other side'sarsenal and weapons production technology. But the research soon became much more generalized,covering information concealment and revelation, signaling and learning, and related ideas in anyrepeated competitive situation.The first four chapters of the book treat the competitive zero-sumside of the theory of repeated games. Chapter five takes up cooperative phenomena where one playermay want to signal information to another. An extensive bibliography covers all items mentioned inthe main text, in the postscripts, and in the introduction. The bibliography also includes acompilation of published papers and books that refer to the original reports.