Learning the state of nature in repeated games with incomplete information and signals

The motivation of this paper comes from repeated games with incomplete information and imperfect monitoring. It concerns the existence, for any payoff function, of a particular equilibrium (called completely revealing) allowing each player to learn the state of nature. We consider thus an interaction in which players, facing some incomplete information about the state of nature, exchange messages while imperfectly monitoring them. We then ask the question: can players learn the true state even under unilateral deviations? This problem is indeed closely related to Byzantine agreement problems from computer science. We define two different notions describing what a player can learn if at most one other player is faulty. We first link these notions with existence of completely revealing equilibria, then we characterize them for monitoring structures given by a graph. As a corollary we obtain existence of equilibria for a class of undiscounted repeated games.

[1]  Matthew K. Franklin,et al.  Reliable Communication over Partially Authenticated Networks , 1997, WDAG.

[2]  S. Hart,et al.  Long Cheap Talk , 2003 .

[3]  Sergiu Hart,et al.  Nonzero-Sum Two-Person Repeated Games with Incomplete Information , 1985, Math. Oper. Res..

[4]  Ehud Lehrer,et al.  Internal correlation in repeated games , 1991 .

[5]  Matthew K. Franklin,et al.  Reliable Communication over Partially Authenticated Networks , 1999, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[6]  R. Simon,et al.  The existence of equilibria in certain games, separation for families of convex functions and a theorem of Borsuk-Ulam type , 1995 .

[7]  Nathan Linial,et al.  Game-theoretic aspects of computing , 1994 .

[8]  Olivier Gossner,et al.  Secure Protocols or How Communication Generates Correlation , 1998 .

[9]  J. Sobel,et al.  STRATEGIC INFORMATION TRANSMISSION , 1982 .

[10]  Jérôme Renault,et al.  3-player repeated games with lack of information on one side , 2001, Int. J. Game Theory.

[11]  Nicolas Vieille,et al.  Repeated communication through the mechanism and , 2001, Int. J. Game Theory.

[12]  Sylvain Sorin Repeated Games with Incomplete Information.Robert J. Aumann and Michael B. Maschler, with the collaboration of Richard E. Stearns , 1996 .

[13]  Matthew K. Franklin,et al.  Secure Communication in Minimal Connectivity Models , 1998, Journal of Cryptology.

[14]  Moti Yung,et al.  Perfectly secure message transmission , 1990, Proceedings [1990] 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[15]  Jérôme Renault Learning Sets in State Dependent Signalling Game Forms: A Characterization , 2001, Math. Oper. Res..

[16]  Tristan Tomala,et al.  Repeated proximity games , 1998, Int. J. Game Theory.

[17]  Robert J. Aumann,et al.  Repeated Games with Incomplete Information , 1995 .

[18]  Sylvain Sorin,et al.  Some results on the existence of Nash equilibria for non-zero sum games with incomplete information , 1983 .

[19]  Ehud Lehrer,et al.  One-Shot Public Mediated Talk , 1997 .

[20]  Sylvain Sorin,et al.  On Repeated Games with Complete Information , 1986, Math. Oper. Res..