
arXiv: 2509.04037
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.
FOS: Economics and business, Theoretical Economics (econ.TH), Theoretical Economics
FOS: Economics and business, Theoretical Economics (econ.TH), Theoretical Economics
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