Lies and slander: truth-telling in repeated matching games with private monitoring

摘要

Incentives for cooperation may be enhanced substantially if a player can rely on the entire community to punish a partner who failed to cooperate. The ability of a player to report a defection to others can constitute a strong deterrent against defection if this report triggers a punishment imposed by the whole community. This paper studies the truth-telling problem in such a context. The paper presents a sequential equilibrium that supports cooperation in which a player unilaterally reports the play of a partner with strict incentives for truth-telling. It is shown, however, that desirable properties of equilibria described in the previous literature that assume truth-telling no longer exist. The implications of the results for practical examples, such as trading on eBay, are discussed.