Beschreibung:
We study experimentally whether and when a shared history of signals affects players' incentives to cooperate in infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemmas. We compare games where the player can privately observe imperfect signals about her partner's actions to games where signals are perfect and games where signals are imperfect but public. Based on evidence from multiple specifications of stage payoffs, we find that subjects are more likely to cooperate when receiving public signals than when receiving private signals only when cooperation is costly and insufficiently beneficial (i.e., low benefit-cost ratio). Furthermore, strategies are both more lenient and forgiving when signals are public than when signals are private in games with a low benefit-cost ratio. The results suggest that a shared history of signals could increase players' incentives to cooperate when cooperative strategies are not sufficiently advantageous in repeated games