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. Thus, a player cannot indefinitely sustain a reputation for non-credible behavior in the presence of imperfect monitoring. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers C70, C78.