2. What is it?
Some caveats
What we know
What we think
What we don’t know

3. • Studied by lot of different disciplines
• Used to mean different things
• A lot of different and related literatures
...so what is reputation?

4. • Audience-specific
• Multidimensional
– Being known
– Being known for something
– Generalized favourability

5. • Benefit of the doubt/credibility
• More attractive for joint ventures
• Perceived as a less risky investment
• Greater market dominance
• Higher accounting performance
• Can protect you when bad things happen
A good reputation can be useful...

6. • Good reputations can also hurt:
– Targeting by activists
– Higher expectations
• Downsizing hurts reputation, even when analysts
suggest it
• People see and focus on different things
• Rankings recreate rankings

7. • Most work has been on “good” reputations
• Most work on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies
list
• A lot of work is theoretical

8. • Anticipatory impression management can help
• Two different types of reputations...
– Reputations may grow and decline in different
ways
– Different tactics might help for different types
of reputations

9. • Cross-level effects
• Bad reputations
• Unintended consequences
• Audience effects
• Cognitive and psychological effects
• Reputation versus reality

10. • Industry, firm, executives
• Coherence across levels
Executives
Firm
Industry

11. • Lasting effects?
• Building versus repairing?

12. • Damaging or constraining nature of good
• Beneficial or enabling nature of bad

13. • Coherence vs. disagreement within
and across audiences
• Clusters?
• Power and politics

14. • Associations between cues and evaluations
• Cognitive evaluations vs. emotional reactions?

15. • When are reputations tightly coupled with reality?
• When are reputations very different from reality?
• What can be done to decrease or increase this
gap?
• Does reputation matter in all situations?
• How much do reputations matter?
• How much should you spend to improve a
reputation?