Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

Mailath, George J.; Morris, Stephen

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Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

38 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2004

See all articles by George J. Mailath

George J. Mailath

University of Pennsylvania - Department of Economics; Research School of Economics, ANU

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 sufficent 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.

Note: An updated version of this abstract can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=692562

Keywords: repeated games, private monitoring, almost-public monitoring, coordination, bounded recall

JEL Classification: C72, C73, D82

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Mailath, George J. and Morris, Stephen Edward, Coordination Failure in Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring (September 2004). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=580681

George J. Mailath (Contact Author)

University of Pennsylvania - Department of Economics ( email )

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