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Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete history of players’ past decisions, reputations in real life are often ambiguous and opaque. Using web-based experiments, we explore the extent to which opaque reputation works in isolating defectors, with and without partner selection opportunities. We found that low reputation works as a signal of untrustworthiness, whereas medium or high reputations are not taken into account by subjects for orienting their choices. Reputation without partner selection does not promote cooperative behavior; that is, defectors do not turn into cooperators only for the sake of getting a positive reputation. Finally, in a third study, when reputation is pivotal to selection, then a substantial proportion of would-be-defectors …