The analogical foundations of cooperation

Article dans une revue: We offer an approach to cooperation in repeated games of private monitoring in which players construct models of their opponents' behavior by observing the frequencies of play in a record of past plays of the game in which actions but not signals are recorded. Players construct models of their opponent's behavior by grouping the histories in the record into a relatively small number of analogy classes for which they estimate probabilities of cooperation. The incomplete record and the limited number of analogy classes lead to misspecified models that provide the incentives to cooperate. We provide conditions for the existence of equilibria supporting cooperation and equilibria supporting high payoffs for some nontrivial analogy partitions.

Auteur(s)

Philippe Jehiel, Larry Samuelson

Revue
  • Journal of Economic Theory
Date de publication
  • 2023
Mots-clés JEL
C70 C72 C73
Mots-clés
  • Analogical reasoning
  • Cooperation
  • Prisoners’ dilemma
  • Repeated game
  • Private monitoring
Pages
  • 105609
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 208