‘Only as good as your last gig?’: an exploratory case study of reputational risk management amongst self-employed musicians

Reputations can take years to build and moments to lose, with significant impacts on the longer term viability of an organisation. There has been a significant increase in literature on reputation risk and its management in recent times, although this has essentially focused on larger corporations. At the other end of the scale, in micro-enterprises, there appears to be very little coverage. To start to address this gap, this study provides insights into perceptions of reputational risk (RR) and reputational risk management (RRM) practice in the music industry. It explores how RR is understood in an unconventional, non-corporate context using a case study of 11 self-employed musicians operating in the South of England, UK. Respondents identified ‘competition’ as being the key risk that they faced, along with insufficient funding, unregulated contracts and protecting intellectual property rights. They did not though, at first, view their reputation in terms of risk. There was no consensus on the definitions of reputation or risk, yet there was awareness that two components determined reputation: musical ability and personal qualities. Despite appearing to have a lack of knowledge and understanding of RRM, the musicians were able to identify strategies for managing reputation, such as: behavioural adaptations, working with agents, choice of venues, use of technology, working collaboratively (with links to social identity) and being constantly reliable. They were also able to identify their stakeholders and the factors influencing their reputation, but this information was not widely used in a strategic way to routinely monitor or manage reputation. An identified ‘barrier’ to RRM was the lack of understanding of this complex issue. Having explored perceptions of reputation and RRM in micro-enterprises, this work forms a platform upon which the next stage of actually (re)designing processes and systems specifically for managing RRM in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises can be built.     

Independent director incentives: Where do talented directors spend their limited time and energy?

We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally based on the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase in a directorship's relative ranking, their board attendance rate increases and subsequent firm performance improves. Also, directors are less willing to relinquish their relatively more prestigious directorships, even when firm performance declines. Finally, forced Chief Executive Officer departure sensitivity to poor performance rises when a larger fraction of independent directors view the board as relatively more prestigious. We conclude that director reputation is a powerful incentive for independent directors.     

Disability insurance and optimal income taxation

This paper studies the design of disability insurance scheme when agents differ in their privately known productivity. We extend the Diamond and Mirrlees (1978) two period model to allow for agents differing ex-ante in their productivity and characterize the optimal nonlinear tax transfer that maximizes a utilitarian welfare function when per-period earnings and age are observable while individuals’ productivity and health status are not observable. We show that the induced tax/benefit scheme should exhibit a marginal income tax that decreases with age for some agents. A marginal subsidy on the young high productive income may be desirable. While the disability scheme always involves the old low productive agents to be indifferent between working and claiming disability benefits, this result is not always true for the old high productive agents. JEL Classification H55 · H23 · E62     

Does the severity of a client’s negative environmental,social and governance reputation affect audit effort and audit quality?

In recent years, investors have begun to value companies’ reputations through their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. ESG risk can affect business processes and controls and can heighten financial risk and threaten a firm’s survival. This study examines whether and how the severity of media coverage of a firm’s negative ESG issues (tainted ESG reputation) is associated with audit effort and audit quality. I find that auditors manage the higher expected engagement risk conveyed by tainted ESG reputation by applying higher audit effort. Next, I observe that the increased effort is associated with auditors likely detecting and requiring adjustments for material misstatements and that tainted ESG reputation is associated with fewer misstatements (i.e., reduces poor audit quality). The association between tainted ESG reputation and audit quality is driven primarily by increased audit report lag, not by increased audit fees. Further, I find that tainted ESG reputation is positively associated with audit effort and reduces poor audit quality for up to three years. The results also show that the audit effort and audit quality effect vary across the three components of ESG.     

‘Radiant with possibility’: Involving young people in creating a vision for the future of their community

This paper argues that young people need to be given the opportunity to recognise the interaction between their own understandings of the world as it is now and the vision of what it might become. To support this argument, we discuss an urban planning project, known as the Lower Mill Site Project, which involved active participation of high school students from the local community. The outcomes of this project demonstrate the positive contributions young people can make to the process of urban redevelopment, the advantages of using a participatory design approach, and the utopian possibilities that can emerge when young people are invited to be part of an intergenerational community project.     

审计师声誉机制：概念、特征及作用机理

当前”大力创建自主知名品牌”已成为注册会计师行业发展的目标之一,研究品牌声誉理论迫在眉睫。本文认为,审计师声誉机制是社会公众及利益相关者对审计师努力建立声誉、利用声誉获取溢价、毁损声誉以获得利润及付出艰辛重获声誉活动的整体认知与反馈。审计师声誉机制包括形成机制、作用机制、毁损机制与修复机制,这四种机制均有各自的特征,并在时间维度的动态过程中体现出长期博弈、价值波动与不规则运动三种作用机理。     

Auditor Reputation Building

This paper reports the results of an experimental economics study designed to examine reputation building by information verifiers (auditors). The results identify boundary conditions to reputation formation and supply insight into auditors' incentives to form reputations. Reputations form in all sessions of treatments that supply nearly immediate rewards to participants who adopt reputation equilibrium strategies. In contrast, reputations form in less than half of the sessions of a treatment where participants have to maintain reputation equilibrium strategies for number of periods before the market rewards their effort. The results suggest the immediacy of rewards for adopting reputation strategies is a critical determinant of reputation formation.     

Audit Committee Members’ Reputation Incentives and Their Effectiveness in Monitoring the Financial Reporting Process

We examine whether the reputation incentives of audit committee members are associated with their effectiveness in monitoring the financial reporting process. Prior research assumes that audit committee members allocate their effort proportionately across all memberships on which they serve. However, our findings suggest that audit committee members with multiple audit committee memberships tend to focus their attention on the memberships that provide them with the greatest reputation incentives. Specifically, firms with a larger proportion of audit committee members where the membership is the most prominent are associated with higher financial reporting quality and more effective monitoring of internal control. Additional tests reveal that audit committee members’ reputation incentives are driving our results rather than independent non-audit committee members’ reputation incentives. We conclude that reputation is a strong incentive for audit committee members, such that it influences their monitoring effectiveness over the financial reporting process.     

The price of reputation: Executive compensation of sin companies

This study examines how and why managers receive pay premiums when vulnerable to social reputation loss. We define sin companies as those operating in the alcohol, gambling and tobacco industries. We show that company managers receive a higher asymmetric pay-for-performance sensitivity in their pay in addition to receiving higher total compensation. In other words, their pay increases with firm performance at a faster rate than that of their non-sin company peers. This finding is consistent with our prediction that sin companies provide greater rewards to their managers upon satisfactory performance, generating a pay premium. We propose two explanations for the reputation pay premium associated with sin-industry managers: the limited future career opportunities and the difficulty of reconciling managers’ self-identity with the employer's social identity. We find stronger support for the latter explanation. The sin-industry pay premium is larger when managers have pro-social and religious tendencies. However, we do not find a smaller pay premium when managers are close to their retirement. Since the career concern should be reduced for managers who are near retirement, this finding is inconsistent with the career opportunity explanation. Overall, our findings are consistent with the notion that managers associate their self-image with employers’ social identities.     

Client Externality Effects of Agents Selling Their Own Properties

This study is the first to examine the principal-agent issues surrounding how agents’ efforts to sell their own properties affect their efforts to sell concurrently listed client properties. The principal-agent model shows that listed agent-owned properties induce agents to worker harder over all, but diminish effort dedicated to marketing concurrently listed client properties, leading to reduced liquidity and/or lower selling prices for those properties. The empirical results show that client properties competing with agent-owned properties remain on the market 30 to 46 % longer and sell for 1.8 % less than properties whose agents have no such conflict of interest.     

风险投资对创业板IPO折价影响的实证研究

本文以截至2011年6月30日在我国创业板上市的236家公司作为研究对象,研究风险投资对创业板IPO折价的影响。研究发现：（1）有风险投资参与的企业IPO折价显著高于无风险投资参与的企业,支持声誉效应假说,即风险投资机构以IPO折价来提早退出投资项目,以此来建立自己的声誉,从而吸引更多的资金流入;（2）在对有风投参股的投资公司做进一步分析后发现一一随着风投参与度的增大,IPO调整折价率并未出现明显的提升,创业板企业IPO时风险投资机构的数量、风险投资机构持股比例与调整折价率关系不显著。     

Reputational cheap talk

We analyze information reporting by a privately informed expert concerned about being perceived to have accurate information. When the expert's reputation is updated on the basis of the report as well as the realized state, the expert typically does not wish to truthfully reveal the signal observed. The incentives to deviate from truth telling are characterized and shown to depend on the information structure. In equilibrium, experts can credibly communicate only part of their information. Our results also hold when experts have private information about their own accuracy and care about their reputation relative to others.     

A time for growth: an interview with Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer. Interview by Paul Hemp

Fast growth is a nice problem to have--but a hard one to manage well. In this interview, Kevin Sharer, the CEO of biotech giant Amgen, talks about the special challenges leaders face when their companies are on a roll. Sharer, who was also head of marketing at pre-WorldCom MCI and a division head and a staff assistant to Jack Welch at GE, offers insights drawn from his own experience--and from his own self-proclaimed blunders: "I learned the hard way that you need to become credible and enlist support inside the company before you start trying to be a change agent. If you think you're going to make change happen simply by force of personality or position or intellect, you'd better think again." And change there was: Under Sharer's leadership, Amgen overhauled its management team, altered its culture, and launched a couple of blockbuster products. How do chief executives survive in that kind of dizzying environment? "A CEO must always be switching between different altitudes--tasks of different levels of abstraction and specificity," Sharer says. "You might need to spend time working on a redesign of your organizational structure and then quickly switch to drafting a memo to all employees aimed at reinforcing one of the company's values." Having a supportive and capable top team is also key: "A top management team is the most revealing window into a CEO's style, values, and aspirations.... If you don't have the right top team, you won't have the right tiers below them. [The] A players won't work for B players. Maybe with a company like GE, the reputation of the company is so strong that it can attract top people to work for weaker managers. In a new company like Amgen, that won't happen."     

Optimal taxation and welfare benefits with monitoring of job search

In order to investigate the interaction between tax policy, welfare benefits, the government technology for monitoring and sanctioning inadequate search, workfare, and externalities from work, we incorporate endogenous job search and involuntary unemployment into a model of optimal nonlinear income taxation. In this setting, the government faces a trade-off between boosting employment of low-skilled agents and raising work effort of high-skilled workers. If sanctions for inadequate search effort can be targeted at high productivity types for whom it is socially optimal to search, the government can afford to levy higher labor taxes on marginal workers without discouraging these agents from seeking work. This allows for lower marginal taxes on work effort of agents with a job. In contrast to workfare, job externalities in the private sector raise marginal tax rates, as the government attaches more importance to boosting employment of low-skilled workers.     

What do professional forecasters' stock market expectations tell us about herding,information extraction and beauty contests?

We study how professional forecasters form equity market expectations based on a new micro-level dataset which includes rich cross-sectional information about individual characteristics. We focus on testing whether agents rely on the beliefs of others, i.e., consensus expectations, when forming their own forecast. We find strong evidence that the average of all forecasters' beliefs influences an individual's own forecast. This effect is stronger for young and less experienced forecasters as well as forecasters whose pay depends more on performance relative to a benchmark. Further tests indicate that neither information extraction to incorporate dispersed private information, nor herding for reputational reasons can fully explain these results, leaving Keynes' beauty contest argument as a potential candidate for explaining forecaster behavior.     

Analyst reputation and management earnings forecasts

Prior studies show that analysts with high reputation are influential in the market. This paper examines whether managers consider analyst reputation in shaping their voluntary disclosure strategy. Using Institutional Investor magazine’s All-American (AA) rankings as a proxy for analyst reputation, we find that the coverage of AA analysts is positively associated with the likelihood of quarterly management earnings forecasts (MEFs). We also find that AA analysts’ forecast optimism is more positively associated with the likelihood of MEFs than non-AA analysts’ forecast optimism when the firm is covered by AA analysts. Analyses based on AA analyst coverage changes and AA status changes confirm the relation between analyst reputation and MEFs. We further find that analyst reputation influences other MEF properties, such as forecast news, bias, and revisions, and that our results are robust to alternative measures of analyst reputation. Further analyses show that market reactions at quarterly earnings announcements are more positive (negative) when firms meet/beat (miss) AA analysts’ forecasts than when firms meet/beat (miss) non-AA analysts’ forecasts. Collectively, our findings suggest that managers strategically provide voluntary forecasts by taking into account the reputation of individual analysts following their firms.     

Reputation concerns and herd behavior of audit committees - A corporate governance problem

This paper offers an explanation for audit committee failures within a corporate governance context. The management of a firm sets up financial statements that are possibly biased. These statements are audited/reviewed by an external auditor and by an audit committee. Both agents report the result of their work, the auditor acting first. Both use an imperfect technology that results in a privately observed signal regarding the quality of financial statements. The audit committee as well as the auditor are anxious to build up reputation in the labor market. Given this predominant goal they report on the signal in order to maximize the market’s assessment of their ability. At the end of the game the true character of the financial statements is revealed to the public with some positive probability. The market uses this information along with the agents’ reports to update beliefs about the agents’ abilities. We show that a herding equilibrium exists in which the audit committee “herds” and follows the auditor’s judgement no matter what its own insights suggest. This result holds even if the audit committee members are held liable for detected failure. However, performance based bonus payments induce truthful reporting at least in some cases.     

商业银行股改转型期声誉风险管理分析

对于商业银行尤其是处于股改转型期的商业银行,应当深刻理解有效规避声誉风险是商业银行健康、有序、可持续发展的重要保障,因而要有意识地建立和强化声誉管理意识,采取切实可行的措施防控声誉风险.本文着重分析了商业银行声誉风险管理的内涵及商业银行声誉风险的形成,针对商业银行声誉风险管理中存在的问题及商业银行股改转型期声誉风险管理的特点,提出了商业银行股改转型期加强声誉风险管理的措施与建议.     

Inequality, Crime and Economic Growth. A Classical Argument for Distributional Equality

This paper studies the dynamic general-equilibrium interactions between inequality, crime and economic growth by embedding the rational choice-theoretical approach to criminal behavior in a heterogeneous-agents endogenous-growth OLG model. Based on their respective opportunity costs, individuals choose to specialize in either legal or criminal activities. While legal households contribute to aggregate goods supply over time by either working or building human capital, criminals make a living by expropriating legal citizens of part of the latter's income. An increase in inequality lowers the economy's growth rate and possesses negative welfare effects for all agents with endowments equal to or above average and for agents with endowment below average that are born sufficiently far in the future.     

The Effect of Reputation and Competition on the Advice of Real Estate Agents

We study a two-period bargaining game where buyers and sellers employ real estate agents to help them determine the sales price of a house. We find that agents are less likely to provide aggressive bargaining advice to their client when they receive percentage commissions and when they work for the buyer. In addition, we find that agents are less likely to suggest aggressive bargaining strategies when there is little market competition, the gains to trade are large, in markets where housing values appreciate slowly, and when dual agency is permitted. More importantly, we show that an agent is more likely to bargain aggressively and capture a portion of the gains to trade for a client when the house’s sales price is closely related to the agent’s reputation and future business (referrals).