Re-Thinking Reputation

Economic models of reputation make strong assumptions about the information available to players.  In particular, it is assumed that they know the entire history of the game to date.  Such models can seldom reproduce the cycling of reputations we observe in the real world.  We build a model of reputation with more realistic assumptions about the partial knowledge of the history that would be available and how it might be used.  This new approach can explain cycles in reputations.