Reputation, Risk, and Visibility
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.
Publication Details
- Journal
- ArXiv.org
- Published
- 2025-09-04
- Primary Topic
- Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00