Reputation

Reputation or image of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity, typically as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria. Reputation or image of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity, typically as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria. Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control. The concept of reputation is considered important in business, politics, education, online communities, and many other fields, and it may be considered as a reflection of that social entity's identity. The cognitive view of reputation has become increasingly prominent in reputation research. It has led to improved understanding of the role played by reputation in a number of practical domains and scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, for instance, the role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s. Working toward such a definition, reputation can be viewed as a socially transmitted meta-belief (i.e., belief about belief) that is a property of an agent, that results from the attitudes other actors have about some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance. Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to spread. Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts not only for reputation-formation but also for the propagation of reputation. To model this aspect, it is necessary to specify and develop a more refined classification of reputation. A recommendation can be extremely precise; in the stock market, for example, an adviser, when discussing the reputation of a bond, can supplement his informed opinion with both historical series and current events. In informal settings, gossip, although vague, may contain precious hints both to facts ('I've been told this physician has shown questionable behavior') and to conflicts taking place at the information level (if a candidate for a role spreads defamatory information about another candidate, whom should you trust?).