When an agent faces audiences with heterogeneous preferences, it is non-trivial to determine what a “good” reputation means, and the return to reputation can be a non-monotonic function. We illustrate this through standard IO examples, and discuss some implications for reputation-building in...

We study impersonal exchange and ask how agents can behave honestly in anonymous transactions without contracts. We analyze repeated anonymous random matching games, where agents observe only their own transactions. Little is known about cooperation in this setting beyond the prisoner's dilemma....