This book presents essentially the content of the CORE discussion papers (DP) 9420, 9421, and 9422 published as “Repeated Games,” Parts A, B, and C in 1994. It may be appropriate to recall first the preface to those discussion papers:
These notes represent work in progress, and far from its final form. An earlier version was circulated previously, and has been cited in various places. In view of this, we felt that the time had come to make it more widely available, in the form of discussion papers. We hope eventually to publish it in a more polished format. Remarks and suggestions are most welcome.
Louvain-la-Neuve, June 1993Unfortunately, the more polished published form was not realized, and the CORE discussion papers were out of print at some point. The objective of this book is to make this material accessible. Although several subsequent versions of this work have been available and were circulated, the material presented here is basically identical to that in the discussion papers with no intention to add new and recent material. We do, however, provide a more detailed presentation of the content, and in Appendix D we briefly introduce further developments after the DP version, along with the corresponding complementary bibliography.
Very sadly, this book is being published when Jean-François Mertens is no longer with us. He passed away on July 17, 2012. We obviously dedicate the book to him as a modest expression of our appreciation of his invaluable contributions to this project and to the underlying research in repeated games of incomplete information that led us to this book.