Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Sep, 2023, Volume 91, Issue 5

Monitoring versus Discounting in Repeated Games

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20206
p. 1727-1761

Takuo Sugaya, Alexander Wolitzky

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.


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