Record-Keeping and Cooperation in Large Societies

Has Punishment Played a Role in the Evolution of Cooperation? A Critical Review

Daniel Clark, Drew Fudenberg and Alexander Wolitzky

The Review of Economic Studies, 2021, vol. 88, issue 5, 2179-2209

Abstract: We introduce a new model of repeated games in large populations with random matching, overlapping generations, and limited records of past play. We prove that steady-state equilibria exist under general conditions on records. When the updating of a player’s record can depend on the actions of both players in a match, any strictly individually rational action can be supported in a steady-state equilibrium. When record updates can depend only on a player’s own actions, fewer actions can be supported. Here, we focus on the prisoner’s dilemma and restrict attention to strict equilibria that are coordination-proof, meaning that matched partners never play a Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium in the one-shot game induced by their records and expected continuation payoffs. Such equilibria can support full cooperation if the stage game is either “strictly supermodular and mild” or “strongly supermodular,” and otherwise permit no cooperation at all. The presence of “supercooperator” records, where a player cooperates against any opponent, is crucial for supporting any cooperation when the stage game is “severe.”

Keywords: Repeated games; Community enforcement; Steady-state equilibria; Records; Cooperation; Prisoner’s dilemma; C73; D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdab016 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:88:y:2021:i:5:p:2179-2209.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().