Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public-monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in such games. It is always possible to coordinate continuation play by requiring behavior to have bounded recall (i.e., there is a bound L such that in any period, the last L signals are sufficient to determine behavior). We show that, in games with general almost-public private monitoring, this is essentially the only behavior that can coordinate continuation play.Repeated games, Private monitoring, Almost-public monitoring, Coordination, Bounded recall

Coordination failure in repeated games with almost-public monitoring

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in such games. It is always possible to coordinate continuation play by requiring behavior to have bounded recall (i.e., there is a bound L such that in any period, the last L signals are sufficient to determine behavior). We show that, in games with general almost-public private monitoring, this is essentially the only behavior that can coordinate continuation play.Repeated games, private monitoring, almost-public monitoring, coordination, bounded recall

Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public-monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in such games. It is always possible to coordinate continuation play by requiring behavior to have bounded recall (i.e., there is a bound L such that in any period, the last L signals are sufficient to determine behavior). We show that, in games with general almost-public private monitoring, this is essentially the only behavior that can coordinate continuation play.repeated games, private monitoring, almost-public monitoring, coordination, bounded recall

Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in such games. It is always possible to coordinate continuation play by requiring behavior to have bounded recall (i.e., there is a bound L such that in any period, the last L signals are sufficient to determine behavior). We show that, in games with general almost-public private monitoring, this is essentially the only behavior that can coordinate continuation play.repeated games, private monitoring, almost-public monitoring, coordination, bounded recall

Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

In repeated games with imperfect public monitoring, players can use public signals to coordinate their behavior perfectly, and thus support cooperative outcomes with the threat of punishments. But with even a small amount of private monitoring, players' private histories may lead them to have sufficiently different views of the world that such coordination on punishments is no longer possible (we describe a simple strategy profile that is a perfect public equilibrium of a repeated prisoner's dilemma with imperfect public monitoring, and yet is not an equilibrium for arbitrarily close games with private monitoring). If a perfect public equilibrium 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.

A Foundation for Markov Equilibria in Infinite Horizon Perfect Information Games

We study perfect information games with an infinite horizon played by an arbitrary number of players. This class of games includes infinitely repeated perfect information games, repeated games with asynchronous moves, games with long and short run players, games with overlapping generations of players, and canonical non-cooperative models of bargaining. We consider two restrictions on equilibria. An equilibrium is purifiable if close by behavior is consistent with equilibrium when agents’ payoffs at each node are perturbed additively and independently. An equilibrium has bounded recall if there exists K such that at most one player’s strategy depends on what happened more than K periods earlier. We show that only Markov equilibria have bounded memory and are purifiable. Thus if a game has at most one long-run player, all purifiable equilibria are Markov.Markov, bounded recall, purification