There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of this literature assumes public monitoring: players always observe precisely the same thing. Even slight deviations from public monitoring to private monitoring that...

We consider repeated games with private monitoring that are .close. to repeated games with public/perfect monitoring. A private monitoring information structure is close to a public monitoring information structure when private signals can generate approximately the same distribution of the...

This paper investigates how cooperation can be sustained in large societies even in the presence of agents who never cooperate. In order to do this, we consider a large but finite society where in each period agents are randomly matched in pairs. Nature decides, within each match, which agent...

The repeated game literature studies long run/repeated interactions, aiming to understand how repetition may foster cooperation. Conditioning future behavior on past play is crucial in this endeavor. For most situations of interest a given player does not directly observe the actions chosen by...

This paper studies the reputation effect in which a long-lived player faces a sequence of uninformed short-lived players and the uninformed players receive informative but noisy exogenous signals about the type of the long-lived player. We provide an explicit lower bound on all Nash equilibrium...

Much of the repeated game literature is concerned with proving Folk Theorems. The logic of the exercise is to specify a particular game, and to explore for that game specification whether any given feasible (and individually rational) value vector can be an equilibrium outcome for some...

There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of the earlier literature assumes public monitoring: players always observe precisely the same thing. Departures from public monitoring to private monitoring that incorporate...

There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of this literature assumes public monitoring: players always observe precisely the same thing. Even slight deviations from public monitoring to private monitoring that...

We prove the perfect-monitoring folk theorem continues to hold when attention is restricted to strategies with bounded recall and the equilibrium is essentially required to be strict. As a consequence, the perfect monitoring folk theorem is shown to be behaviorally robust under almost-perfect...

We study the long-run sustainability of reputations in games with imperfect public monitoring. It is impossible to maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that does not play an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty about types. Thus, a player cannot indefinitely sustain a...