Reputation Evaluation: An Information-driven Approach for Government Regulation

With the ongoing development of governance instruments, information has become an increasingly important tool for governments to perform regulatory functions and reduce regulatory burdens. By disclosing positive or negative information about firms, governments can incentivize or constrain corporate behavior, thereby enhancing regulatory capacity and effectiveness. However, existing scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to the underlying processes, effects, and limits of such information-based regulatory practices. Drawing on a case study of the “Red-Black List” for property management companies in District B of City A, this article examines a new information-based regulatory mechanism—reputation evaluation. This mechanism uses public evaluations of firms as a basis for government regulation and directly shapes firms' market opportunities and prospects, thereby strengthening governmental oversight and incentivizing property management companies to improve their service. This mechanism is generated through the aggregation, accumulation, and calculation of information, and its effective application depends on four key components: information production, information dissemination, market sanctions, and repeated interaction. First, the government acts as the producer of information by collecting positive and negative evaluation about firms from citizens and generating an overall assessment through aggregation and calculation. Second, the government disseminates these evaluations to citizens, thereby shaping their perceptions and judgments of firms. Third, citizens incorporate this information into their choices of property management companies and withdraw from firms with poor reputations. Finally, under conditions of repeated interaction, firms come to value their reputations as crucial for long-term survival and development, paying particular attention to how they are evaluated by both the government and citizens. In this way, the reputation evaluation approach functions as a form of indirect regulation that disciplines firms and incentivizes improvements in service. Based on a long-term, in-depth analysis of the “Red-Black List” case, this article further shows that the effectiveness of reputation evaluation is not unlimited. Specifically, it struggles to address complex problems involving multiple stakeholders, entails potentially high information production costs, and raises legitimacy concerns. In particular, when the government acts as the producer of information, data collection practices and algorithm design affect firms' acceptance of this regulatory mechanism. In the future, governments need to strike a balance between effectiveness and legitimacy when deploying information-based reputation evaluation.