 Certain conditions must hold if reputation effects are to underwrite commitment. A person’s reputation can have a standing value across a range of games she plays, but in that case her concern for its value should be factored into payoffs in specifying each specific game into which she enters. Reputation can be built up through play of a game only in a case of a repeated game. Then the value of the reputation must be greater to its cultivator than the value to her of sacrificing it in any particular round of the repeated game. Thus players may establish commitment by reducing the value of each round so that the temptation to defect in any round never gets high enough to constitute a hard-to-resist temptation. For example, parties to a contract may exchange their obligations in small increments to reduce incentives on both sides to renege. Thus builders in construction projects may be paid in weekly or monthly installments. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund often dispenses loans to governments in small tranches, thereby reducing governments’ incentives to violate loan conditions once the money is in hand; and governments may actually prefer such arrangements in order to remove domestic political pressure for non-compliant use of the money. Of course, we are all familiar with cases in which the payoff from a defection in a current round becomes too great relative to the longer-run value of reputation to future cooperation, and we awake to find that the society treasurer has absconded overnight with the funds. Commitment through concern for reputation is the cement of society, but any such natural bonding agent will be far from perfectly effective.