Reputational Mechanisms Research Articles

To see, or not to sea: Differing performance outcomes from visible and private health inspections in the U.S. cruise travel industry

Regulators and rating agencies can reassure consumers by monitoring firms and by publicizing these efforts and their results. However, consumers are not always uniformly aware of these monitoring efforts. I adapt theory about reputational mechanisms to predict that organizations will perform better in response to monitoring that is visible to market participants, versus monitoring that is conducted privately. I also examine two moderators, each involving the theorized mechanisms driving this effect, that could strengthen the relationship between visible inspections and performance. I test associated hypotheses using a natural experiment that randomly allocated health inspections across cruise ships within and outside of passenger sailings. Findings contribute to the literature on organizational reputation, by revealing differences driven by the visibility of information about organizations in the marketplace.

Influencing Factors and Mechanisms of Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation under Green and Low-Carbon Transition: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Amid China’s pursuit of a green and low-carbon transition, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is facing new challenges. Our research delves into the influencing factors and mechanisms for CSR reputation under green and low-carbon transition and provides practical enlightenment for enterprises to achieve sustainable development. This paper constructs a comprehensive index system of CSR from five dimensions (innovation, coordination, sustainability, openness, and sharing), and CSR reputation of China’s A-share listed companies is comprehensively estimated by using an entropy method and data from 2013 to 2021. Then, from the perspective of external supervision and internal governance, we discuss the influence factors of CSR reputation, with an emphasis on the impact of public environmental concerns. Finally, the realization mechanism of CSR is further revealed. It is found that public environmental concern and the expansion of the enterprise scale boost the enhancement of CSR reputation. However, a higher proportion of female managers tends to hinder CSR reputation. Furthermore, public environmental concern plays a more prominent role in improving CSR reputation of non-state-owned and eastern enterprises. Additionally, public environmental concern significantly enhances CSR reputation through green technology innovation and executive environmental awareness. This research provides valuable insights for improving CSR reputation and optimizing regulatory compliance and governance practices.

Network Centrality and Dissent Voting by Directors on Boards

AbstractWe investigate how directors’ positions within board interlocking networks influence their monitoring behaviors from a social network perspective. We argue that the effectiveness of directors’ monitoring of a firm's management depends on their ability to overcome the information barrier and their motivation to develop a public reputation in the directorship market. We further contend that network centrality can supplement directors’ existing information set and facilitate reputation spillover, leading to an increase in the extent of their dissent on boards. We analyze the unique individual-director-level data of Chinese firms and find that directors occupying positions of greater centrality in the board interlock network are more likely to dissent. We then examine the underlying mechanisms of information and reputation through two moderators: firm transparency and media mention of a director. We also find that the effect of network centrality on dissent is weaker for independent directors. Our study advances the corporate governance literature by examining the micro-foundations of board monitoring and providing a social network perspective.

Effects of morality and reputation on sharing behaviors in human-robot teams.

The relationship between robots and humans is becoming increasingly close and will become an inseparable part of work and life with humans and robots working together. Sharing, which involves distributing goods between individuals and others, involves individuals as potential beneficiaries and the possibility of giving up the interests of others. In human teams, individual sharing behaviors are influenced by morality and reputation. However, the impact on individuals' sharing behaviors in human-robot collaborative teams remains unclear-individuals may consider morality and reputation differently when sharing with robot or human partners. In this study, three experiments were conducted using the dictator game paradigm, aiming to compare the effects and mechanisms of morality and reputation on sharing behaviors in human and human-robot teams. Experiment 1 involving 18 participants was conducted. Experiment 2 involving 74 participants was conducted. Experiment 3 involving 128 participants was conducted. Experiment 1 validated the differences in human sharing behaviors when the agents were robots and humans. Experiment 2 verifies that moral constraints and reputation constraints affect sharing behaviors in human-robot teams. Experiment 3 further reveals the mechanism of differences in sharing behaviors in human-robot teams, where reputation concern plays a mediating role in the impact of moral constraint on sharing behaviors, and the agent type plays a moderating role in the impact of moral constraint on reputation concern and sharing behaviors. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the interaction mechanism of human-robot teams. In the future, the formulation of human-robot collaborative team rules and the setting of interaction environments can consider the potential motivation of human behavior from both morality and reputation perspectives and achieve better work performance.

Why Austen, not Burney? Tracing the Mechanisms of Reputation and Legacy

During the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017, the narrative of Austen’s rise to fame and her ongoing celebrity circulated throughout modern culture. But how did this happen? When Austen died in 1817, it was not obvious that Austen would become the archetypal British woman writer. Frances Burney was far more famous in her lifetime than Austen was in hers, and Burney’s novels (particularly Evelina and Cecilia) achieved as much, if not more, critical acclaim than Austen’s works. By comparing the afterlives of Jane Austen and Frances Burney, the factors that shape legacy come into focus—and scholars can use some of these factors to shape the legacy of British women writers today.

Predicting psychologists’ approach to academic reciprocity and data sharing with a theory of collective action

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the factors influencing the data sharing habits of psychologists with respect to academic reciprocity.Design/methodology/approachA research model was developed based on Ostrom’s (2003) theory of collective action to map psychologists’ underlying motivations for data sharing. The model was validated by data from a survey of 427 psychologists, primarily from the psychological sciences and related disciplines.FindingsThis study found that data sharing among psychologists is driven primarily by their perceptions of community benefits, academic reciprocity and the norms of data sharing. This study also found that academic reciprocity is significantly influenced by psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits, academic reputation and the norms of data sharing. Both academic reputation and academic reciprocity are affected by psychologists’ prior experiences with data reuse. Additionally, psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits and the norms of data sharing are significantly affected by the perception of their academic reputation.Research limitations/implicationsThis study suggests that Ostrom’s (2003) theory of collective action can provide a new theoretical lens in understanding psychologists’ data sharing behaviours.Practical implicationsThis study suggests several practical implications for the design and promotion of data sharing in the research community of psychology.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the initial studies that applied the theory of collective action to the mechanisms of reputation, community benefits, norms and reciprocity in psychologists’ data sharing behaviour. This research demonstrates that perceived community benefits, academic reputation and the norms of data sharing can all encourage academic reciprocity, and psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits, academic reciprocity and data sharing norms all facilitate their data sharing intentions.

Regulation or Reputation? Evidence from the Art Market

This article investigates the role of regulation and reputation in the art trade. We look at attribution issues in the auction market, and in France in particular, where both regulatory and reputational mechanisms have been implemented. More specifically, we focus on the Marcus Decree—a pioneering decree that regulates the authentication process of artworks in France since 1981—and the self-regulated authentication systems developed by international top-tier auction houses. Our findings suggest that the implementation of the decree did neither significantly strengthen the market for autograph and non-autograph works, nor radically modify the landscape of attributions in France, whereas similar but stronger trends in prices and volumes are found in reputational markets (UK, US). We also attribute the moderate effects of the Marcus decree to the size and relative depth of the French art market, the concomitant globalization of the art trade and the development of technical art history, compliance mechanisms and legal compliance costs. Our results are supported by empirical evidence from a data set composed of 15th- and 16th-century Flemish paintings auctioned between 1972 and 2015 in a regulated market (FR), but also in reputational markets (UK, US, and other European countries).

The impact of user-generated fake news on brand equity: moderating mechanisms of brand attitude and corporate reputation

The impact of user-generated fake news on brand equity: moderating mechanisms of brand attitude and corporate reputation

How does supply chain knowledge enhance green innovation? The mediation mechanisms of corporate reputation and non-supply chain learning

PurposeUnderstanding the factors that advance green innovation is crucial for firms to deal with the complexity of green innovation. In light of this, this study aims to explore the influence of supply chain knowledge, non-supply chain learning and corporate reputation on green innovation.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a quantitative research approach where data is gathered from managers of 208 small and medium enterprises in Ghana using survey questionnaires. The structural equation modeling is used to analyze the survey data.FindingsThe findings reveal supply chain knowledge relates positively with non-supply chain learning, corporate reputation and green innovation. Corporate reputation also impacts green innovation positively and provides partial mediation effect between supply chain knowledge and green innovation. Meanwhile, non-supply chain learning does not relate positively with green innovation as well as fails to mediate the impact of supply chain knowledge on green innovation.Originality/valueThis study contributes to knowledge in the mediating mechanisms of corporate reputation and non-supply chain learning between supply chain knowledge and green innovation. Through this, the authors propose a theoretical model to explain how firms can leverage supply chain knowledge, corporate reputation and non-supply chain learning to improve green innovation and can serve as the basis for further theoretical and empirical research in innovation and external sources of knowledge.

The impact of user-generated fake news on brand equity: Moderating mechanisms of brand attitude and corporate reputation

The impact of user-generated fake news on brand equity: Moderating mechanisms of brand attitude and corporate reputation

Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation

Research in various disciplines has highlighted that humans are uniquely able to solve the problem of cooperation through the informal mechanisms of reputation and gossip. Reputation coordinates the evaluative judgments of individuals about one another. Direct observation of actions and communication are the essential routes that are used to establish and update reputations. In large groups, where opportunities for direct observation are limited, gossip becomes an important channel to share individual perceptions and evaluations of others that can be used to condition cooperative action. Although reputation and gossip might consequently support large-scale human cooperation, four puzzles need to be resolved to understand the operation of reputation-based mechanisms. First, we need empirical evidence of the processes and content that form reputations and how this may vary cross-culturally. Second, we lack an understanding of how reputation is determined from the muddle of imperfect, biased inputs people receive. Third, coordination between individuals is only possible if reputation sharing and signaling is to a large extent reliable and valid. Communication, however, is not necessarily honest and reliable, so theoretical and empirical work is needed to understand how gossip and reputation can effectively promote cooperation despite the circulation of dishonest gossip. Fourth, reputation is not constructed in a social vacuum; hence we need a better understanding of the way in which the structure of interactions affects the efficiency of gossip for establishing reputations and fostering cooperation.

Divided governmental structure and state compliance with international human rights law: A reputation-based approach

AbstractPrevious research has analysed a range of domestic stakeholders that make national governments’ commitments to international human rights law credible, including an independent judiciary, legislative veto players, political opposition groups, and non-governmental organizations. But how do the power dynamics within the government affect state compliance with international human rights law? Building on the basic understanding that international human rights law needs to pass through domestic political and administrative processes before it can be implemented on the ground, this article articulates a reputation-based theoretical framework to explain how the lack of reputational mechanisms at the local level and national leaders’ shifting of blame for non-compliance to sub-national officials and the internal governance structure – two salient characteristics in a decentralized political system – make international human rights law less effective. A case study of US compliance with Article 36 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations sheds light on how international reputational concerns interact with divided authority structure to shape national leaders’ and subnational authorities’ policy responses to the enforcement of international human rights standards.

International Legal Measures to Ensure the Safety of Navigation

INTRODUCTION. The development of public relations in the field of international trade transportation presupposes new conditions for their safety. This work represents a failure of an attempt to conduct such a study and a comprehensive understanding of the problems existing in this area, as well as the search for ways to solve them by international legal mechanisms. In parallel, certain organizational and legal measures were proposed, and the problems of certain aspects of merchant shipping were also raised.MATERIALS AND METHODS. For the preparation of this work, the normative legal acts, both domestic and international, were considered, the positions of scientists – representatives of different states. A comparison of legal norms and practice of their application was carried out on the basis of available information materials. Within the framework of this work, methods of analysis, comparative legal method, deduction were also used. On this basis, the modeling of ways of possible optimization of the activities of subjects of international law, specializing in security issues, was carried out.RESEARCH RESULTS. In essence, the content of the article is the main part devoted to the problems of ensuring the safety of maritime transportation, introductory and concluding parts. The latter reflects the main conclusion devoted to the formulation of the question of the possibility of combining the efforts of various actors to ensure the integrated safety of merchant shipping, which can be combined in a single international legal document. At the same time, it is not at all necessary to place special emphasis on mandatory law enforcement and other punitive measures. Economic and reputational mechanisms are quite applicable, stimulating the activities of states to create all the necessary conditions for safe navigation in the relevant waters.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The application of this proposal in practice can potentially have an organizational and legal impact on the policies of various states and individual subjects of commercial activity in terms of ensuring maximum protection of the widest range of subjects of sea trade.

Quantifying the exclusionary process of canonisation, or How to become a classic of the social sciences

ABSTRACT This article theoretically and empirically analyses the allocation of recognition and status in a scientific community and of the rank ‘classic’ to better comprehend the selective and reputational mechanisms at work since the beginning of the discipline. The aim is to examine the process of canonisation and the exclusionary logic, which systematically eliminates certain knowledge of specific scholars over time. The role of cultural capital , such as excellent scientific work and its recognition, is taken into consideration in contrast to social capital, such as influential social positions within the field, and to personal attributes such as gender, regarding their relevance for status. A unique database of 957 scholars representing the field of early German sociology was created, and a quantitative analysis was conducted. The results indicate the field was structured very unequally with high rewards for scholars with social capital. However, other than what one might expect, social power does not appear to be relevant for joining the classics canon in the twentieth century. Regardless of the type of capital, while there is great continuity for the most successful male scholars without social positions, women were largely excluded . Exclusionary mechanisms, eliminating the knowledge produced by minorities, may still be at work.

IM-LDP: Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd-Sensing Based on Local Differential Privacy

In recent years, the rapid development of embedded technology has given rise to mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems to outsource sensing tasks to the public crowd equipped with various mobile devices. Sensing data often involves the workers’ privacy, but overprotection of workers’ data leads to the decrease of the data accuracy. Therefore, a crucial issue in such systems is how to balance workers’ data privacy and data aggregation accuracy. The local differential privacy guarantees the data privacy by returning the privacy budget to workers. However, existing works only considered the workers’ reputation as the weight of the aggregation result, but did not correlate with the rewards that workers deserve, which restrained workers’ incentive of participation. Different from these works, by quantifying workers’ reputation, we propose IM-LDP, an incentive mechanism for MCS based on local differential privacy, which includes four mechanisms of incentive, reputation, data perturbation and data aggregation. Specifically, incentive mechanisms are able to select workers who can provide more accurate data and compensate themselves for their privacy costs. The reputation mechanism quantifies the workers’ reputation to improve their payments. The data perturbation mechanism ensures the tradeoff between the data privacy and aggregation accuracy, and the data aggregation mechanism generates highly accurate aggregation results. We evaluate the proposed IM-LDP through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments.

Shareholder Stewardship Enforcement

One of the central problems of shareholder stewardship around the world is rendering institutional investors good monitors of their investee companies and improving their accountability to both companies and their own beneficiaries and clients. The co-existence of soft norms (stewardship codes or principles) as well as semi-hard and hard law rules across the globe raises important questions about the future of shareholder stewardship frameworks and their enforcement. In this paper, we investigate this problem focusing on the availability (or not) of strategies to enforce shareholder stewardship. We adopt a broad approach to enforcement mechanisms in the area of shareholder stewardship and set out a simple conceptual taxonomy based on three dimensions. The proposed taxonomy takes into account the nature of the norm enforcer and distinguishes between self-enforcement and third-party enforcement. In the latter we consider public, quasi-public, private, market and social norm-enforcers. These actors may or not be the standard setters of the relevant norms. We then distinguish between formal – in the sense of either (quasi)judicial proceedings or membership/adherence sanctions within stewardship networks – and informal enforcement mechanisms. Finally, we take into account the temporal dimension of enforcement and distinguish between ex ante (monitoring and deterrence) and as ex post compliance. Our starting point is that, for market actors to be able to absorb bottom-up or, most importantly, top-down regulation, flexibility in adapting to best shareholder stewardship practices is needed. Indeed, examining the enforcement mode of shareholder stewardship across 25 countries we confirm that informal enforcement by market actors is the preferred option. Looking forward, we sketch the broad contours of an optimal shareholder stewardship enforcement framework based on our proposed taxonomy. We caution against administrative sanctions and support instead a facilitating role for public and quasi-public actors in two distinct ways. First, public and quasi-public actors can facilitate shareholder stewardship enforcement via membership/adherence sanctions taking place within stewardship networks (such as public tiering) or informal mechanisms (including public information diffusion through annual reports and guidelines, public reputational mechanisms, such as ‘name and shame’, and private dialogue). Secondly, where ultimate investors have suffered damages from deficient disclosure of engagement policies, we support the introduction of a facilitating system of civil claims initiated by public or quasi-public authorities that can serve both restorative-compensatory objectives and public interests. We also advance the importance of promoting and refining enforcement by market and social actors. Our proposed enforcement framework is not intended to be applied in a uniform fashion around the world. Rather its multi-actor, multi-modal and temporally continuous fashion can adjust to any national or supranational framework.

Как российские институты влияют на эффективность госзаказа

<span>В статье анализируется институциональная среда функционирования системы госзаказа, являющейся неотъемлемым звеном распределения государственных финансов в современной России. Исследованы динамика объема госзаказа относительно ВВП и влияние на нее изменений в законодательстве о закупках и макроэкономических условий функционирования российской экономики. На основе построения моделей Кобба-Дугласа для российских регионов показано уменьшение эффективности системы госзаказа за период с </span><span class="wmi-callto">2011</span><span class="wmi-callto"> по 2017</span><span> гг., выражающееся в снижении эластичности ВРП по госзакупкам. Подробно описаны некоторые институциональные проблемы госзаказа, влияющие на его эффективность в современных российских условиях, а именно: недостаток прозрачности информации и доступа к торгам; оппортунизм в системе госзакупок; вовлеченность в коррупцию и откаты; поддержание несовершенной конкуренции (выражающейся в низком участии в торгах, «затачивании» условий контрактов под конкретных поставщиков, увеличении числа несостоявшихся или отмененных контрактов и пр.); создание вертикальных (частично интегрированных) структур; «эффект IV квартала» и аврального освоения бюджетных средств. Авторы приходят к выводу, что поддержание искусственной конкурентной среды, основанной скорее на локальных социальных связях, чем на широком рыночном доверии и репутационных механизмах, препятствует экономии и эффективному использованию бюджетных средств. Важной проблемой развития системы госзакупок остаются учет предпочтений всех участников системы и формирование эффективных стимулов для исполнения контрактов.</span>

Public Values, Private Regulators: Between Regulation and Reputation in the Sharing Economy

Abstract In traditional sectors, the intervention of private parties in the regulatory system tends to be justified by their enhanced expertise, government cuts or efficiency gains. In the sharing economy (e.g., home-sharing services offered by Airbnb), quality control and regulatory tasks (e.g., inspections) are to, a great extent, informally delegated to online platforms and peer-to-peer communities that rate and review performance. These communities consist of users that do not have more than their personal experience and the guidance of online platforms to underpin their assessments. Existing literature has extensively criticized the reliability of these online reputational mechanisms, but it has overlooked other far-reaching effects of outsourcing regulatory tasks to private parties. This Article offers a more complete analysis of the regulatory value of online reputation. I argue that reputational mechanisms have the potential of creating democratic spaces where users can provide unique, regular, and first-hand insights that would otherwise be disregarded in a traditional regulatory system. Nevertheless, in their current form, these mechanisms still offer inadequate protection to the public values that typically underlie the regulation of certain services. This Article explains this problem by comparing the protection of public values in the sharing economy to that of traditional regulated sectors. This Article contributes to the literature by reflecting on whether the sharing economy is inviting us to rethink the broader involvement of citizens in the protection of public values and the challenges thereof. It suggests a framework to improve online reputational mechanisms and a better dialogue between traditional regulation and online reputation.

Economics of RP–PvP Events in World of Warcraft (via the Example of Argent Dawn Server)

This paper explores the economics of roleplaying player versus player (RP–PvP) events in World of Warcraft, on the Argent Dawn server. The RP–PvP events remain an unexamined niche in the research of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games and present a peculiar case of “anarchy” within cyberspace, being formally ungoverned by Blizzard Entertainment. To investigate this phenomenon, I construct the economic theory of RP–PvP events and hypothesize that participants can only derive utility from such events if and only if their effective time spent roleplaying is maximized. I show that to achieve this goal, roleplayers devise private rules of governance and enforce them through various means, from reputational mechanisms to aggressive monitoring of outsiders. The paper seeks to pioneer in bridging the gap between governance literature in economics and game studies by highlighting creative methods of managing complex problems of social coordination without formal supervision.

The (in)congruence of measures of corporate social responsibility performance and stakeholder measures of corporate social responsibility reputation

AbstractA central proposition of the “business case” for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is that a company's CSR practices are linked to consumer behavior and a firm's financial performance through reputational mechanisms. This study addresses the equivocal support for this proposition through an empirical analysis of the survey items most often used to assess a company's CSR and its stakeholder reputation. This study tests the congruence among nine different measures of environmental, social, and governance dimensions of CSR and a public corporate reputation measure. Two distinct factors are identified—direct CSR impact and assessment/reputation—suggesting that the global corporate reputation does not capture tangible CSR impact (environment and social) and is only congruent with a measure of intangible CSR performance (governance). The study highlights the importance of taking a multidimensional approach. Addressing measurement issues helps unpack the theoretical and practical link between CSR and corporate reputation and provides strategic guidance when planning CSR business and communication strategies.