Organizations and Overlapping Generations Games: Memory, Communication, and Altruism

Roger Lagunoff and Akihiko Matsui ()
Additional contact information
Akihiko Matsui: Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo

No 1, Working Papers from Georgetown University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies the role of memory and communication in games between ongoing organizations. In each organization, each individual, upon entry into the game, replaces his predecessor who has the same preferences and faces the same strategic possibilities. Entry across distinct organizations are asynchronous: no two individuals alive at a date have entered at the same time. We model these as repeated games between overlapping generations of individuals (OLG games). It has been shown elsewhere that Folk Theorems hold in OLG games with long enough lived individuals who can perfectly observe. However, the Folk Theorem fails for many games when individuals have no prior memory, i.e., no individual can witness events that occur before his entry into the game. We examine OLG games without prior memory. We then examine such games when the past can be communicated by one generation to the next through "cheap talk" communication. With costly communication, an approximate Folk Theorem holds only when there is some altruistic link between cohorts in an organization. The equilibria in this Folk Theorem require a special form of intergenerational sanctions. In these sanctions, punishment is sometimes carried out long after both victim and perpetrator have left the game. Without this special structure, altruism may in fact destroy cooperation when it would otherwise be possible.

Keywords: Organizations; Overlapping Generations Games; Memory; Communication; Altruism. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D74 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28pp
Date: 2001-03-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/economics/pdf/0102.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
None

Related works:
Journal Article: Organizations and overlapping generations games: Memory, communication, and altruism (2004)
Working Paper: Organizations and Overlapping Generations Games: Memory, Communication, and Altruism (2001)
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:geo:guwopa:gueconwpa~01-01-02

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Roger Lagunoff Professor of Economics Georgetown University Department of Economics Washington, DC 20057-1036
http://econ.georgetown.edu/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Georgetown University, Department of Economics Georgetown University Department of Economics Washington, DC 20057-1036.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcia Suss ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).