The Economic Analysis Of Reputation

Reputation plays an important role in the modern matket economy, which refers to institution, law, culture and economy and other aspects. With the development of economy, especially after China entered WTO, capital and talents will not be limited factors, but reputation will be more and more important to our economy. Coming with the continual appearance of actual problems, the researches on reputation problems are being on the sharp rise. But most of these researches are lack of support from the theory of economics, socialogy, and history and so on. What's more, these analyses are some shallow, just with comperatively unilateral conclusions. With the use of game-theory in economics, although more and more importance is attached to the reputation problems, so far, the use of reputation in economics is only in the primary stage. As a result, there's still extensive room left for the theoretical analysis. With the angle of view in economics, this essay studies and elaborates the reputation problems systematically, and acquires some distinct conclusions as follows: Firstly, distinct definitions of three vague opinions on the economic research of reputation problems are made in this essay. In the first place, we point out that there are both exact differences and close relations among faithfulness, reputation and credit, which could not be mixed up. In the second place, from the relation among economics, ethics and socialogics, we analyze the economic opinion on ethic problems and then come to this conclusion: economics could be used to study the reputation problems. Lastly, in the opinion of the author, reputation should be considered as individual choice behavior in given social production way. Secondly, through the analysis of past reputation theory, we find shortcomings in them and then form new opinion in this essay. The resent western economics discussed the effect of non-economic factors on the economic institution, and modern western institutional economics made great effort to find the junction of non-economic factors and market institution, but in vain. Marxist economics had some discussions on credit, which has very important guiding meaning for us. Thirdly, right now there isn't an uniform opinion on the conception of reputation, so except for a new conception-reputation ability, the definition of reputation is made from four aspects in this essay. The main opinion the author insists is that whether people attach importance on the reputation is not determined by the nature of person, but the ability of carrying out the treaty, which is called reputation ability we have mentioned above. The economic reputation could not exist without reputation ability, which is formed under the effect of some external factors such as culture, institution and information and so on. In the short run, these external factors detemine the behaviors of reputation participants, but these external factors and the behaviors of reputation participants are effected mutually in the long run. Meanwhile, from the historical analysis of the generation and development of exchange, we could come to this conclusion: when there is exchange, there must be reputation, but it doesn't imply that when there is exchange, there must be reputation institution. Fourthly, in this essay, we could find that the premise of reputation is information, and the motivity of reputation is economic profit, while the assurance of reputation is institution. Fifthly, as the recessive economic institution and the invisible asset of...