Journal of Mathematical Economics, Vol. 50, pp. 290–300, 2015

A Tractable Analysis of Contagious Equilibria

This paper studies contagious equilibrium in infinitely repeated matching games. The innovation is to identify a key statistic of contagious punishment that, used together with a recursive formulation, generates tractable closed-form expressions for continuation payoffs, off equilibrium. This allows a transparent characterization of the dynamic incentives created by contagious punishment schemes.