Folk Theorems with Bounded Recall under (Almost) Perfect Monitoring, Second Version

George J. Mailath () and Wojciech Olszewski

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: A strategy profile in a repeated game has bounded recall L if play under the profile after two distinct histories that agree in the last L periods is equal. Mailath and Morris (2002, 2006) proved that any strict equilibrium in bounded-recall strategies of a game with full support public monitoring is robust to all perturbations of the monitoring structure towards private monitoring (the case of almost-public monitoring), while strict equilibria in unbounded-recall strategies are typically not robust. We prove the perfect-monitoring folk theorem continues to hold when attention is restricted to strategies with bounded recall and the equilibrium is essentially required to be strict. As a consequence, the perfect monitoring folk theorem is shown to be behaviorally robust under almost-perfect almost-public monitoring. That is, the same specification of behavior continues to be an equilibrium when the monitoring is perturbed from perfect to highly-correlated private.

Keywords: Repeated games; bounded recall strategies; folk theorem; imperfect monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
Date: 2008-05-30, Revised 2008-07-28
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