Community Enforcement Beyond the Prisoner's Dilemma

repeated anonymous random matching setting. It is well known that, if the stage-game is the prisoner's dilemma, cooperation can be supported in equilibrium through grim trigger, also called 'community enforcement' or contagion in this setting. But, little is known about sustaining cooperation in games other than the prisoner's dilemma, when information transmission is minimal. In this paper we consider a class of two-player games beyond the prisoner's dilemma, and characterize a subset of the individually rational and feasible payoffs that can be sustained in sequential equilibrium, if players are sufficiently patient. Cooperation is sustained through what we call 'delayed contagion'. In the equilibria we construct, there is an initial phase of trust-building in which deviations are temporarily ignored. Once trust has been built, the communities play cooperatively.