Inducing Good Behavior via Reputation

This paper asks whether or not it is possible to induce agents to good behavior permanently via regulators' reputations and attain perpetual social efficiency. We propose and analyze a repeated incomplete information game with a suitable payoff and monitoring structure between a regulator possessing a behavioral type and an agent. We provide an affirmative answer when a patient regulator faces myopic agents: Reputation empowers the regulator to prevent agents' bad behavior in the long-run with no cost and, hence, attain the social optimum in any Nash equilibrium. These findings are robust to requiring short-lived agents to choose any one of their actions with an arbitrarily small but positive probability. On the other hand, we show that when both parties are long-lived and sufficiently patient, the limiting robust equilibrium cannot be close to perpetual good behavior. The contrast we attain demonstrates the significance of the interaction's longevity and exhibits a novel application of the theory of learning and experimentation in repeated games