Law Commons^™

Reputational Economies Of Scale, Miguel F.P. De Figueiredo, Daniel Klerman

Faculty Articles and Papers

For many years, most scholars have assumed that the strength of reputational incentives is positively correlated with the frequency of repeat play. Firms that sell more products or services were thought more likely to be trustworthy than those that sell less because they have more to lose if consumers decide they have behaved badly. That assumption has been called into question by recent work that shows that, under the standard infinitely repeated game model of reputation, reputational economies of scale will occur only under special conditions, such as monopoly, because larger firms not only have more to lose from behaving …