Web-Based Experiment to Analyze Norms of Reputation Making: How to Evaluate Actions with a Opponent Having a Bad Reputation

We describe a web-based survey to assess how to evaluate a reputation by referring to his or her history of actions and taking account of his or her opponent’s reputation. The analysis indicates that there is a distinction between possible actions with an opponent having bad reputations. That is, cooperative action with opponents that have bad reputations is less favorable than cooperative action with someone with an average reputation, and defection against opponents that have bad reputations is more favorable than defection against someone with an average one. Evaluation of actor with opponents that have bad reputation are found to depend on two evaluation factors, intimacy and social desirableness, because evaluation words extracted from the respondents’ questionnaires could be classified with these two dimensions. This finding indicates that the norm of reputation making is more complex than the intuitive one-dimensional mechanism.