The paper is a first attempt at modeling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations. A member's current incentives are affected by his past behavior and, because his track record is observed only with noise, by the group's past behavior as well. The paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature. It shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone, and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt. Last, the paper applies the theory to analyze when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality. Copyright 1996 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.