Team versus individual reputations : a model of interaction and some empirical evidence.

How do individuals, goods or services (e.g. researchers) through their own reputation give birth to a group's reputation (e.g. a laboratory) and conversely how do they take advantage of this group's reputation. Do they contribute to (derive benefit from) the group's reputation proportionally to their individual reputation or in a different way? To answer these questions we develop in this paper a theoretical model in which collective reputation both determines and is determined -simultaneously- by individual reputations as suggested first by Tirole (1996). This paper also proposes an empirical strategy to assess both umbrella impacts (the impact of a collective reputation on a given individual reputation) and contributions to the umbrella (the contrary). Then, the theoretical model is applied to the case of Bordeaux wines from a rich dataset on individual opinions.