Imperfect Monitoring and Impermanent Reputations∗

Imperfect Monitoring and Impermanent Reputations1

We study the long-run sustainability of reputations in games with imperfect public monitoring. It is impossible to maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that does not play an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty about types. Thus, a player cannot indefinitely sustain a reputation for non-credible behavior in the presence of imperfect monitoring. Journal of Economic Liter...

Disappearing Private Reputations∗

We study the long-run sustainability of private reputations in the presence of imperfect public monitoring. A long-lived player has private reputations if the uninformed players’ beliefs are private. We show that even in this case it is impossible to maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that does not eventually play an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty about types. T...

Experiencing the Architecture of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent

Disappearing private reputations in long-run relationships

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 un...

Disappearance of reputations in two-sided incomplete-information games

This paper studies long-run sustainability of false reputations in a class of games with imperfect public monitoring and two long-lived players, both of whom have private information about their own type and uncertainty over the types of the other player. This class, namely reputation games with one-sided moral hazard, can capture a wide range of economic interactions between two parties that m...