Reputation and Disclosure in Dynamic Networks

Abstract

Public delay can be informative when the existence, custodian, and review dates of hard evidence are observed. I study a disclosure protocol in which a sealed record is docketed, held by a public custodian, and revealed only at terminal disclosure. At each review, retention is not silence: it rules out the states in which the holder would have relayed or disclosed. This censoring event yields an exact Bayesian filter. Under interval strategies, the public posterior is summarized by finitely many support endpoints. A compact reputation benchmark verifies Markov perfect Bayesian equilibria with such strategies and gives finite time resolution on compact unresolved slices. With two certified routes for the same record, retention on one route changes what remains feasible on the other before it acts. Common record censoring creates network value that pairwise formation can miss.