reputationsinthewild

While an older conventional wisdom held that reputation was "one of the few things worth fighting for," later work suggested that reputations either did not matter or possibly did not exist at all. We argue that much of the recent debate over reputation has been hamstrung by scholars asking and answering entirely different questions about reputations. We introduce a new conceptual framework that divides reputa- tional inferences into the evaluation phase (in which observers update their beliefs about type/attributes) and a diagnostic phase in which judgments are made about present and future behavior. We then introduce a new type of evidence into this debate, presenting results from original surveys  elded on four samples (including Israeli decision-makers, Israeli publics, and American IR scholars) to study the evaluation phase in which repu- tation costs were incurred by various actors as a result of the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Syrian civil war. Our results suggest that reputation costs exist, are worse in cases of failed threats, attach to both leaders and the countries they represent, and are perceived similarly by elite leaders and ordinary citizens. Finally, our studies revealed the existence of a "home-away gap": compared to foreign observers, American IR schol- ars seem to underestimate the magnitude of reputation costs the US has incurred by backing down on threats.