Reputation, Risk, and Visibility

Abstract

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.

arXiv commentWithdrawn by the author after identifying substantive errors in the formal analysis. The main theoretical propositions are not established as stated, and the Registered Reports interpretation is not supported by the model. No corrected version is planned; this version should not be cited