Belief-based equilibria in the repeated prisoners' dilemma with private monitoring

We analyze repeated prisoners' dilemma games with imperfect private monitoring and construct mixed trigger strategy equilibria, Such strategies have a simple representation, where a player's action only depends upon her belief that her opponent(s) are continuing to cooperate. When monitoring is almost perfect. the symmetric efficient outcome can be approximated in any prisoners' dilemma game, while every individually rational feasible payoff can be approximated in a class of such games. The efficiency result extends when there are more than two players. It requires that monitoring be sufficiently accurate but does not require very low discounting when a public randomization device is available. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science.