We investigate whether two players in a long-run relationship can maintain cooperation when the details of the underlying game are unknown. Specifically, we consider a new class of repeated games with private monitoring, where an unobservable state of the world influences the payoff functions...

Players coordinate continuation play in repeated games with public monitoring. We investigate the robustness of such equilibrium behavior with respect to ex-ante small private-monitoring perturbations. We show that with full support of public signals, no perfect public equilibrium is robust if...

This paper proposes and studies a tractable subset of Nash equilibria, belief-free review-strategy equilibria, in repeated games with private monitoring. The payoff set of this class of equilibria is characterized in the limit as the discount factor converges to one for games where players...

This paper proposes and studies a tractable subset of Nash equilibria, belief-free review-strategy equilibria, in repeated games with private monitoring. The payoff set of this class of equilibria is characterized in the limit as the discount factor converges to one for games where players...

I study two-player undiscounted repeated games with imperfect private monitoring. When strategies are restricted to those implementable by nite automata, fewer equilibrium outcomes are possible. When only two-state automata are allowed, a simple strategy, "Win-Stay, Lose-Shift," leads to...

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...

A repeated game with private monitoring is “close” to a repeated game with public monitoring (or perfect monitoring) when (i) the expected payoff structures are close and (ii) the informational structures are close in the sense that private signals in the private monitoring game can be...

We prove a folk theorem for stochastic games with private, almost-perfect monitoring and observable states when the limit set of feasible and individually rational payoffs is independent of the state. This asymptotic state independence holds, for example, for irreducible stochastic games. Our...

This paper analyzes repeated games in which it is possible for players to observe the other players' past actions without noise but it is costly. One's observation decision itself is not observable to the other players, and this private nature of monitoring activity makes it difficult to give...

This paper studies repeated games with private monitoring where players make optimal decisions with respect to costly monitoring activities, just as they do with respect to stage-game actions. We consider the case where each player can observe other players' current-period actions accurately...