Absorbing Team Games

Eilon Solan

Games and Economic Behavior 31 (2000), 245-261.

A team is a group of people, having the same motives but possibly different available actions. A team game is a game where two teams face each other; namely, the players are divided into two teams, and the payoff function of players in the same team coincide. An absorbing game is a repeated game where some of the entries are absorbing, in the sense that once they are chosen the play terminates, and all future payoffs are equal to the payoff at the stage of termination.

We prove that every absorbing team game has an equilibrium payoff, and that there are e-equilibrium profiles with cyclic structure for every e>0.