A reputation for honesty accumulates slowly but can be destroyed rapidly

Evidence

Reputation is a capital asset. One can build it up by pursuing certain courses of action, or destroy it by pursuing certain others. Sometimes a reputation can be acquired by pure chance, as was the point of the short story Luck by Mark Twain. Sometimes it can be destroyed by misfortune, as in the case of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. A reputation for honesty, or trustworthiness, is usually acquired gradually. This alone suggests that the language of probabilities is the right one in which to discuss reputation: a person’s reputation is the ‘public’s’ imputation of a probability distribution over the various types of person that the person in question can be in principle. Reputation is rarely of the all-or-nothing variety. And although a reputation for honesty may be acquired slowly, it can generally be destroyed very quickly. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 913

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines reputation as a capital asset and as the public’s imputed probability distribution over a person’s possible types — a precise computational definition useful for the Luhmann/Hardin synthesis.
• XREF: Connects directly to Hardin’s trust-as-encapsulated-interest framework and to the earlier Milgrom reading on reputation systems in trade, where reputation substitutes for direct knowledge of others’ honesty. — connects to: Thirty years of reputation cracked irreparably in a single day — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 4085; Legal conduct can still destroy a reputation for incorruptibility — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 4108; Compliments and praise do not reliably pay the rent — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making It in Show…, 133
• SHARE: The Mark Twain ‘Luck’ and Jean Valjean examples give concrete narrative instances of reputation by chance vs. destruction by misfortune — worth sharing with someone interested in reputation economics.