The role of company reputation in business simulations

The literature on simulation and gaming has done very little to address emerging concepts such as relationship marketing, brand equity, and company reputation. This article is the first of a two-part series relating these to each other and business simulations. This article begins by casting company reputation in the context of an emerging business paradigm in which companies seek to harness the long-term value of reputation and relationships to lower transaction costs with key stakeholders. It presents a model for incorporating the concept of company reputation into a total enterprise simulation. It builds on an empirically derived model of company reputation in which various company characteristics are linked to two underlying dimensions of reputation: sympathy and competence. The article suggests how the various components of company reputation might be operationalized in a simulation game. It then discusses how they might be used to both help determine and evaluate student performance.