Monitoring versus Discounting in Repeated Games

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.