REPUTATION WITHOUT COMMITMENT

Abstract. In the reputation literature, players have commitment types which represent the possibility that they do not have standard payo¤s but instead are constrained to follow a particular plan. In this paper, we show that arbitrary commitment types can emerge from incomplete information about the stage payo¤s. In particular, any \u85nitely repeated game with commitment types is strategically equivalent to a standard \u85nitely repeated game with incomplete information about the stage payo¤s, such that the types with identical solutions have almost identical prior probability in two games. Then, classic reputation results can be achieved with uncertainty concerning only the stage payo¤s. JEL Numbers: C72, C73. 1