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This paper provides the first systematic experimental analysis of delay, communication, and reaction lags in a repeated prisoners' dilemma with frequent actions and imperfect monitoring. We independently manipulate delay of information and the ability of subjects to engage in limited communication and find that subjects earn significantly more without delay, a result that cannot be explained by standard repeated games models. We also find that communication always improves welfare and that average payoffs in one of our treatments (with communication and no delay) are significantly greater than the upper bound on public Nash equilibrium payoffs. We explore the possibility that this is driven by bounded rationality in the form of reaction lags and find that slowing down the experiment has no significant effect on behavior.
