9410485 Sundaram The framework of Markovian or Stochastic games has been used to analyze a great variety of issues in economics and game theory. It is somewhat surprising then that, in contrast to the very well-understood framework of repeated games, remarkably little is known in general about the properties of abstract Markovian games. The first part of the project addresses open theoretical questions about the existence of subgame-perfect equilibrium in Markovian games, and the properties of the equilibrium set. The second part continues ongoing research by the investigators into the applications of the Markovian game framework to economic problems. Research is continued on common-property resource games, research and development in oligopoly, and repeated elections and principal/agent games. Two new classes of games studied are those of information-processing and of natural- resource exploitation. The investigators plan to complete a paper detailing the literature on the applications of Markovian games and publish it jointly with an earlier paper providing a detailed summary of available theoretical results on the existence and properties of equilibrium in abstract Markovian games as a monograph for other researchers and advanced graduate students.
