Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

Abstract

In repeated games with imperfect public monitoring, players can use public signals to coordinate their behavior, and thus support cooperative outcomes, but with private monitoring, such coordination may no longer be possible. Even though grim trigger is a perfect public equilibrium (PPE) in games with public monitoring, it often fails to be an equilibrium in arbitrarily close games with private monitoring. If a PPE has players' behavior conditioned only on finite histories, then it induces an equilibrium in all close-by games with private monitoring. This implies a folk theorem for repeated games with almost-public almost-perfect monitoring. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73.