Media exposure and corporate reputation

The media typically provide greater coverage of large and reputed corporations. I provide a theory of firm reputation dynamics based on the positive feedback effects resulting form the correlation between firm size and media coverage. I show that, in equilibrium, the dynamics of firm reputation are highly asymmetric: slow increases in reputation are followed by sudden drops. Moreover, endogenous media coverage implies greater dispersion of firm performance. Finally, I consider implications for corporate media strategy, namely the trade-off between “no news is good news” and “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”