Reputation Effects with Endogenous Records

A patient firm interacts with a sequence of consumers. The firm is either an honest type who supplies high quality and never erases its records, or an opportunistic type who chooses what quality to supply and may erase its records at a low cost. We show that in every equilibrium, the firm has an incentive to build a reputation for supplying high quality until its continuation value exceeds its commitment payoff, but its ex ante payoff must be close to its minmax value when it has a sufficiently long lifespan. Therefore, even a small fraction of opportunistic types can wipe out the firm's returns from building reputations. Even if the honest type can commit to reveal information about its history according to any disclosure policy, the opportunistic type's payoff cannot exceed its equilibrium payoff when the consumers receive no information.