Agents work for their own reputations when young but for their firms when old. An individual with an established reputation cannot credibly commit to exerting effort when working alone. However, by hiring and working with juniors of uncertain reputation, seniors will have incentives to exert effort. Incentives for young agents arise from a concern for their own reputation (and the opportunity to take over the firm) but older agents work for the reputation of their firms (and the opportunity to sell out to juniors). An important theoretical contribution is an example of a mechanism that endogenously introduces type uncertainty.

Credence-goods experiments have focused on stylized settings in which experts can perfectly identify the buyer's best option and that option works without fail. However, in nature, credence goods involve uncertainties that complicate assessing the quality of service and advice. We introduce two sources of uncertainty. The first is diagnostic uncertainty; experts receive a noisy signal of buyer type so might make an 'honest' mistake when advising what is in buyers' best interests. The second is service uncertainty; the services available to the buyers do not always work. Both sources of uncertainty make detection of expert dishonesty more difficult, so are hypothesized to increase dishonesty by experts and decrease buyers' trust (willingness to consult experts for advice and to follow expert advice) - decreasing efficiency of the interactions. We also analyze how buyers use ratings and whether ratings restrain dishonesty and attenuate distrust by creating reliable reputations. In contrast to hypotheses, we find that uncertainty has no effect on honesty and increases trust; additionally, ratings do not improve efficiency of the transactions under uncertainty - in part due to buyers' tendency to 'shoot the messenger' (give low ratings) when they buy service that does not work due to bad luck, and to give experts the 'benefit of the doubt' (high ratings) when they buy service that may have been intentionally overprovided (not in the buyer's best interest).

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.

This dissertation consists of three essays that focus on the role of electronic reputation systems in anonymous two party transactions. The first two essays are laboratory experiments that explore how uncertainty impacts the functionality of the reputation system. The third essay investigates possible reasons why users of reputation systems do not always volunteer their private information and leave feedback about completed transactions. It reports on a pilot test of a survey designed to provide additional information about the provision of information to electronic reputation systems.