Where does reputation collide?

In the theory of repeated games, reputation is the track record a player builds through past conduct, which others read as a signal of what kind of player they face, so that acting cooperatively today can be rational because it preserves the belief that one is a cooperative type. Kreps and Wilson's 1982 Reputation and imperfect information showed how a small doubt about a player's type lets reputation sustain cooperation or deterrence across a long game. The referent is an equilibrium property of beliefs inside a formal model, not a firm's public image, an online rating, or a person's standing among neighbors.[1]

Unit

A player's type-belief held by others across repeated play

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Derived within a game model as the posterior belief others hold about a player's type given the history of play

In strategic management, corporate reputation is the overall assessment that stakeholders form of a firm over time, a collective judgment of its quality and standing built from its past actions and signals. Fombrun and Shanley's 1990 What's in a name? Reputation building and corporate strategy treated it as a valuable intangible asset that firms compete to build and that shapes how the market treats them. The referent is an audience's shared appraisal of an organization, gauged by surveys and rankings, not an equilibrium belief in a game model, a rating aggregated by software, or an individual's repute among peers.[2]

Unit

One firm's standing in the eyes of its stakeholders

Recovery means

A damaged reputation can be rebuilt slowly through consistent conduct, though it may never fully return

Measured by

Assessed through stakeholder surveys and published reputation rankings such as league tables

In online platforms, a reputation system collects and aggregates feedback about participants' past behavior into a score that helps others predict who can be trusted before they interact. Resnick, Kuwabara, Zeckhauser, and Friedman's 2000 Reputation systems described how sites gather ratings and publish them so that a stranger's history stands in for direct experience. The referent is an engineered mechanism that pools many ratings into a public number, not a belief inside a game model, a firm's image among stakeholders, or a person's repute carried by word of mouth.[3]

Unit

A participant's aggregated feedback score in a rating system

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Computed by pooling users' ratings of past transactions into a published trust score

In the study of social life, a person's reputation is the collective opinion others hold and share about them, circulated through talk and gossip and tied to their standing in a community. Emler's 1990 A social psychology of reputation argued that reputation is socially distributed knowledge about persons, maintained by conversation rather than held privately by any one observer. The referent is a shared judgment about an individual that lives in a group's talk, close to but not the same as status, and distinct from an equilibrium belief, a firm's public image, or a score computed by software.[4]

Unit

One person's repute as held collectively by a group

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through gossip, reputational surveys, and peer nominations of what a group believes about a person