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This chapter presents an alternative approach to reputations based on a long-lived player who endeavors to separate himself from an undesirable (or inept) type, in contrast to the traditional models based on pooling with desirable commitment types. The long-lived player faces a continuum of long-lived idiosyncratic players. The goal is a more flexible model in which reputations have the properties of productive assets, requiring investments to build and maintain. The chapter provides an extensive discussion of the relationship between this model and previous analyses, as well as bad reputations and the role of the market for reputations.

This chapter introduces the adverse-selection approach to reputations. The chapter considers a long-lived player facing a sequence of short-lived players. If there is some (perhaps very small) chance that the long-lived players is a commitment (or action) type, then the payoff for a sufficiently patient long-lived player (in any Nash equilibrium of the repeated game) must be close to the payoff he would receive if he was known to be that commitment type (the Stackelberg payoff). This result is established for perfect monitoring games using arguments based on Bayes’ rule and for imperfect monitoring games using martingale arguments (merging). A characterization of asymptotic play shows that for imperfect monitoring games, reputations are temporary.

This chapter introduces the basic unifying principle of work in repeated games and reputations, namely that continuation play in repeated interactions can be used to create intertemporal incentives (incentives that could not arise in an isolated interaction). The prisoners’ dilemma, oligopoly and “product-choice” game illustrate.

This chapter summarizes the array of major conceptual distinctions generated by a network interpretation of reputation. They include small village versus small world, reputational information flow versus storage, discursive versus distributive facets of reputation, reputational parameters versus content claims, reputational accuracy versus validity, reputational networks within personality versus social systems, and lifetime versus transitional versus posthumous reputational networks. Three areas of unfinished business are identified: character and reputation, rumor and reputation, and corporate reputation. The network interpretation provides a comprehensive model for linking the most disparate issues raised by the phenomenon of reputation and demonstrates the potential for a productive and wide-ranging program of interdisciplinary research.

This argument extends the reputation results of the previous chapter to games in which both players are long-lived. The argument here is complicated by the intertemporal incentives that now appear in the choices of the (long-lived) uninformed player. While the results are accordingly somewhat weaker, they again take the form of lower bounds on the payoff of a sufficiently patient long-lived player whose type is subject to some uncertainty. Relatively strong payoff bounds are obtained for games with conflicting interests, games of imperfect monitoring, and games with sophisticated commitment types.

This chapter presents examples of finitely repeated perfect-monitoring games of the type in which reputation arguments were first introduced, including the prisoners’ dilemma with a tit-for-tat commitment type and the chain store game. It also presents an example of a reputation result for a finitely repeated game of imperfect monitoring.

This chapter looks at the role brewers played in financing new businesses during the early stages of industrialization. Since brewing was relatively capital-intensive among the traditional industries, brewers were likely to have accumulated capital and regarded as local notables. The investment pattern of a certain soy-sauce brewer is examined. It is shown that the desire to maintain their status as notables in regional communities motivated brewers to invest in newly established businesses that were highly risky, but nonetheless strategically important for regional development.

The question this study set out to answer was: if reputation is the interest to be protected by defamation law then what should be the test(s) for what is defamatory? The stated aim was to fill a gap in the common law by providing a principled, theoretically coherent statement of law regarding what is defamatory. This chapter proposes a new legal framework that aims to meet that goal. Only the principal test for what is defamatory should be retained because it is the only one that meaningfully protects reputation. However, the common law should dispose of the traditional, exclusive presumptions that form the content of ‘the right-thinking person’ and instead use inclusive presumptions that are premised upon an acceptance of equal moral worth. Any displacement of these presumptions should be controversial. A departure from the commitment to equal moral worth should be made only with great care and caution.

This chapter presents a theory of reputation to complement that discussion in Chapter 2. Here, the way in which reputation is acquired and lost is presented. It is explained that the reputational impact of state actions depends critically on the expectations of other states as well as the non‐reputational payoffs faced by the acting state. In order to understand the role of reputation, then, one must consider both reputational and non‐reputational payoffs. The extent to which reputations are compartmentalized (by issue area, by governing regime, by dyad) also impacts the force of reputational concerns, and the chapter clarifies how alternative categories of reputation can affect outcomes.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the primary objective of the book, which is to address the question: to what extent can communicators actually perform their expected role to anticipate and head off crises or to guide their organizations through crises with the least possible damage to reputation? It argues that successful crisis management is not guaranteed by scientific planning and prescriptive decision making, but by the nature of the organization, the crisis, and the environment. The book's complexity-based approach to crisis management is then described.

This chapter identifies theoretical elements that generate two major aspects of reputation—the discursive facet, dealing with information actively flowing through the person’s reputational network, and the distributive facet, dealing with latent information stored within the network’s person bins. They constitute the two distinct forms in which the common knowledge of the specific person is socially represented. The term fama was a culturally rich concept in medieval Europe that referred to what was generally said about events or actions, as well as what was generally said about a person. Within modern social psychology, the theory of social representation holds that everyday talk and common knowledge continue to play a central and pervasive role in contemporary culture.

Chapter 6 considers the person as both agent and resultant of reputation. The person seeks to convey a particular social image to others while using feedback from others as a source of self-knowledge. General renown and approbation are seen as sources of social acceptance and social capital within a person’s community. This chapter examines the craft wisdom to be found in the professional realm of reputation management that is increasingly available to public figures, celebrities, and corporations. Publicity agencies offer proactive services to mold, circulate, and protect public visibility and image. False assertions may threaten our reputation, but we might also actually engage in undeniably disreputable conduct. For either case, a guild of specialists is ready to come to the rescue and provide reputation damage control.

Chapter 8 mobilizes the network interpretation to analyze in detail a classic venue for taking action in defense of one’s reputation—the libel courts. A network interpretation is implicit in key elements of the rationale and structure of common-law actions for defamation. Anywhere throughout the members and linkages of one’s reputational network, an assertion potentially damaging to reputation can enter and circulate narrowly or broadly and in ways difficult to predict or track. Psychological research indicates that attributions of disreputable acts appear to be much more difficult to disconfirm than attributions of virtuous and socially desirable acts, thereby presenting a challenge for rehabilitating the reputation of vindicated plaintiffs. This chapter reviews the changing and expanding concepts of reputation within the common-law tradition of libel from the fifteenth century to the contemporary era of Internet defamation.

Provides an account of the transformation of policy‐making. From the top‐down state‐centric approach and from the bottom‐up grassroots popularism of the 60s and 70s, policy‐making now reflects an increasing emphasis on the importance of ideas and institutions. How can we understand this shift in emphasis? Offers an account of the contracting approach, on the basis of the growing need for efficiency in public policy, credibility and reputation maintenance, and the rediscovery of the importance of institutions. Theoretical implications of the contracting approach are outlined.

The folk theorem shows that cooperative behavior can be sustained as a Nash equilibrium in indefinitely repeated games — a phenomenon known as reciprocal altruism. The same theorem offers a solution to various other social mysteries. Who guards the guardians? How are authority, blame, courtesy, dignity, envy, friendship, guilt, honor, integrity, justice, loyalty, modesty, ownership, pride, reputation, status, trust, virtue, and the like to be explained as emergent phenomena? How do beliefs that many people privately know to be false survive?