In an experiment, players? ability to learn to cooperate in the repeated prisoner?s dilemma was substantially diminished when the payoffs were noisy, even though players could monitor one another?s past actions perfectly. In contrast, in one-time play against a succession of opponents, noisy...

We investigate the impact of reputation in a laboratory experiment. We do so by varying whether the past choices of a long-run player are observable by the short-run players. Our framework allows for reputation to have either a beneficial or a harmful effect on the long-run player. We find that...