Reputation without commitment in finitely repeated games

Abstract

In the reputation literature, players have commitment types, which represent the possibility that they do not have standard payoffs, 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 payoffs. In particular, any finitely repeated game with commitment types is strategically equivalent to a standard finitely repeated game with incomplete information about the stage pay-offs. Then classic reputation results can be achieved with uncertainty concerning only the stage payoffs.