Reputation and Competition with Social Convention

In this note we develop a pure hidden action model of reputation and repeated Bertrand competition, where firms are homogeneous, entry is free, and consumers infer future non-contractible quality both from information about past quality and from current prices. We show that a positive level of quality is sustained as an outcome of a stationary equilibrium, together with a social convention about the minimum acceptable quality. If instead the social convention is not relevant, more entry occurs at the cost of worse quality and lower consumer welfare. Keywords: reputation, pure hidden action, Bertrand competition, social convention