Reputation, Risk, and Visibility
Theoretical Economics
2025-09-05 v1
Abstract
When does reputation make experts play it safe, and what policy reverses that? I isolate a single lever - visibility of outcomes. In a two-page model with binary signals and outcomes, I show: (i) with an uninformative safe option and symmetric visibility, career concerns alone do not generate conservatism; (ii) increasing failure visibility (as in Registered Reports) weakens high-reputation caution and relaxes selection. I provide a necessary-and-sufficient local sign test, agnostic about utility curvature and allowing informative safe actions, and an identification map suitable for staggered RR adoption.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.04037,
title = {Reputation, Risk, and Visibility},
author = {Georgy Lukyanov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.04037},
year = {2025}
}