【主讲】Harry Di Pei (助理教授，西北大学)
【主题】Trust and Betrayals: Reputation Building and Milking without Commitment
【时间】2018年12月14日 (周五) 10：00-11：30
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼702室
【语言】英文
【摘要】I introduce a reputation model where all types of the reputation building agent are rational and are facing lack-of-commitment problems. I study a repeated trust game in which a patient player (e.g. seller) wishes to win the trust of some myopic opponents (e.g. buyers) but can strictly benefit from betraying them. Her benefit from betrayal is her persistent private information. I provide a tractable formula for the patient player’s highest equilibrium payoff, which converges to her mixed Stackelberg payoff when the lowest benefit in the support of the prior belief vanishes. In equilibria that attain this highest payoff, reputations are built and milked gradually and the patient player’s behavior must be non-stationary. This enables her to extract information rent in unbounded number of periods while minimizing her long-term reputation loss. Moreover, her reputation in equilibrium can be computed by counting the number of times she has betrayed as well as been trustworthy in the past. This captures some realistic features of online rating systems.
