P.: Competition and reputation

We study the interaction of competition and reputation as e¢-ciency enhancing mechanisms in environments where informational or lack of commitment constraints a¤ect the ability of …rms to compete for market shares. We …rst analyze a dynamic model of monopolis-tic competition with experience goods. If beliefs satisfy a minimal regularity condition, there is a unique equilibrium with quality goods being produced and the price has a mark-up which is either the full information monopolistic mark-up or, if this is not sustainable (e.g., when goods are very close substitutes), the rate of time preference, that acts as a reputation constraint. A variation of the model allows us to analyze the private provision of currencies. We show that if sup-pliers of currency decide their actions sequentially, and beliefs satisfy the regularity condition, the equilibrium exhibits a zero in‡ation rate, so that the e¢cient outcome is not achieved