Seminar on "Self-evident Events and the Value of Linking"

Prof. Chan received a PHD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. He is currently Professor of Economics at Fudan University. He has previously taught at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include game theory, mechanism design and political economy.

We propose a theory of linking in repeated games based on the notion of selfevident sets, which describes what becomes "public" at the end of a stage-game where players observe both public and private information. For any stage game we obtain a tight bound on the average per-period efficiency loss needed to strictly enforce a stage-game outcome throughout a T-period repeated game when T is large. Our results apply to all monitoring structures (public and private) and strategy profiles (pure and correlated).