The Impact of Monitoring in Infinitely Repeated Games: Perfect, Public, and Private

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Aoyagi, Masaki; Bhaskar, V.; Frechette, Guillaume R.
• 署名单位: University of Osaka; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; New York University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20160304
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1-43
• 关键词: repeated prisoners-dilemma; repeated play; folk theorem; COOPERATION; COMMUNICATION; strategies; BEHAVIOR; trust; COORDINATION; INFORMATION

摘要

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study the effect of the monitoring structure on the play of the infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. Keeping the strategic form of the stage game fixed, we examine the behavior of subjects when information about past actions is perfect (perfect monitoring), noisy but public (public monitoring), and noisy and private (private monitoring). We find that the subjects sustain cooperation in every treatment, but that their strategies differ across the three treatments. Specifically, the strategies under imperfect monitoring are both more complex and more lenient than those under perfect monitoring. The results show how the changes in strategies across monitoring structures mitigate the effect of noise in monitoring on efficiency.