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Econometrica Vol. 91 No. 5 2023

Monitoring versus Discounting in Repeated Games

Takuo Sugaya1; Alexander Wolitzky2

1 Stanford GSB · 2 Department of Economics, MIT

Abstract

We study how discounting and monitoring jointly determine whether cooperation is possible in repeated games with imperfect (public or private) monitoring. Our main result provides a simple bound on the strength of players' incentives as a function of discounting, monitoring precision, and on‐path payoff variance. We show that the bound is tight in the low‐discounting/low‐monitoring double limit, by establishing a public‐monitoring folk theorem where the discount factor and the monitoring structure can vary simultaneously.

DOI
10.3982/ecta20206
Volume
91
Issue
5
Pages
1727-1761
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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