Disappearing Private Reputations in Long-Run Relationships, Second Version

Abstract:     
For games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring, Cripps, Mailath, and Samuelson (2004) showed that an informed player facing short-lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types. This paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long-lived and has private beliefs, so that the informed player's reputation is private. We also show that the rate at which reputations disappear is uniform across equilibria and that reputations disappear in sufficiently long discounted finitely-repeated games.

Note: A previous version of this paper can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=511243

Keywords: Reputation, Imperfect Monitoring, Repeated Games, Commitment, Private Beliefs

JEL Classifications: C70, C78

Working Paper Series