Reputation

The reputation or prestige of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity – typically developed as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria, such as behavior or performance.^[1]

Reputation is a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control.^[2] It is a subject of study in social, management,^[3] and technological sciences.^[4] Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, 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 scales, from everyday life^[5] to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

The concept of reputation is considered important^[6] in business, politics, education, online communities, and many other fields, and it may be considered^{[citation needed]} as a reflection of a social entity's identity.