In repeated games, equilibria requiring threats of punishment may be implausible if punishing a deviator hurts all the others. When all the punishers suffer from carrying out a punishment in the continuation, it would be in their best interest to forgive the deviation. Taking this line of...

Monetary theorists have advanced an intriguing notion: we exchange money to make up for a lack of enforcement, when it is difficult to monitor and sanction opportunistic behaviors. We demonstrate that, in fact, monetary equilibrium cannot generally be sustained when monitoring and punishment...

Cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games can usually be sustained only if the game has an infinite horizon. We analyze to what extent the theoretically crucial distinction of finite vs. infinite-horizon games is reflected in the outcomes of a prisoner's dilemma experiment. We compare three...

A fundamental question in social sciences is how trust emerges. We provide an answer which relies on the formation of social and economic relationships. We argue that behind trust lies the fact that individuals invest in connections taking into account the potential externalities networks...

We study how the willingness to enter long-term bilateral relationships affects cooperation even when parties have little information about each other, ex ante, and cooperation is otherwise unenforceable. We experimentally investigate a finitely-repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, allowing players to...

Due to their many applications, large Bayesian games have been a subject of growing interest in game theory and related fields. But to a large extent, models (1) have been restricted to one-shot interaction, (2) are based on an assumption that player types are independent and (3) assume that the...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...

Consider repeated two-player games with perfect monitoring and discounting. We provide an algorithm that computes the set V* of payoff pairs of all pure-strategy subgame perfect equilibria with public randomization. The algorithm provides significant efficiency gains over the existing...

This paper studies an infinite horizon repeated moral hazard problem where a single principal employs several agents. We assume that the principal cannot observe the agents' effort choices; however, agents can observe each other and can be contractually required to make observation reports to...

We study repeated games with imperfect public monitoring and unequal discounting. We characterize the limit set of perfect and public equilibrium payoffs as discount factors converge to 1 with the relative patience between players fixed. We show that the pairwise and individual full rank...