Repeated games with many players

Takuo Sugaya () and Alexander Wolitzky ()
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Takuo Sugaya: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Alexander Wolitzky: Department of Economics, MIT

Theoretical Economics, Forthcoming

Abstract: Motivated by the problem of sustaining cooperation in large groups with limited information, we analyze the relationship between group size, monitoring precision, and discounting in repeated games with independent, player-level noise. The viability of cooperation under independent noise is linked to the per-capita channel capacity of the stage game monitoring structure. We show that cooperation is impossible if the per-capita channel capacity is much smaller than the discount rate. A folk theorem under a novel identification condition provides a near converse. If attention is restricted to co-linear equilibria (a generalization of strongly symmetric equilibria), cooperation is possible only under much more severe parameter restrictions.

Keywords: Repeated games; large population; imperfect monitoring; noise; mutual information; channel capacity; folk theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-20
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