Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important dn: factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organisations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

A cognitive view of reputation

Until very recently, the cognitive nature of reputation was substantially ignored. This has caused a misunderstanding of the effective role of reputation in a number of real-life domains and the related scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, the role of reputation as a partner selection dn: mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s.

An interdisciplinary integrated approach to reputation, accounting for both evolutionary grounds and cognitimechanisms and processes, is still missing. Only such an integrated approach can point to guidelines for managing reputation and for designing technologies of reputation.

Working toward such a definition, reputation as a [socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns properties of agents, namely their attitudes toward some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance. Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts also for the transmissibility and therefore for the propagation of reputation.

In order to model this aspect, it is necessary to specify and understand a more refined dn: classification of the multi-faceted cognitive dn: object commonly addressed as reputation.

A recommendation can be extremely precise (think for example of the stock market, where your advisor, when discussing the reputation of a bond, can supplement his informed opinion with both historical series and current events. On the contrary, in informal settings, gossip, although vague, may contain precious hints both to actual facts been told this physician has shown questionable behaviour") and to conflicts taking place at the information level (if a candidate for a role spread bar doubtful reputation about another candidate, who should you trust?).