The reputation or prestige of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity – typically developed as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria, such as behavior or performance.

Reputation is a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control. It is a subject of study in social, management, and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency: individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

The concept of reputation is considered important in business, politics, education, online communities, and many other fields, and it may be considered as a reflection of a social entity's identity.

Since 1980, the study of "corporate reputation" has attracted growing scholarly attention from economics, sociology, and management. The concept of reputation has undergone substantial evolution in the academic literature over the past several decades. Terminology such as reputation, branding, image and identity is often used interchangeably in both the popular press and – until recently – in the academic literature, as well.

The academic literature has generally settled on a small cluster of perspectives on "what reputation is" in a company context.

Mark C. Suchman (1995) examines the relationship between legitimacy, status, and reputation, emphasizing that while these concepts are interconnected, they represent distinct forms of social evaluation. Legitimacy refers to the degree to which an organization's actions align with societal norms and values, status reflects its position within a social hierarchy, and reputation is based on assessments of its past actions and achievements. Understanding these distinctions is essential for organizations seeking to navigate their social environments successfully.

Economists use game-theory to describe corporate reputations as strategic signals that companies use to convey to markets some of their qualities and abilities. Sociologists view corporate reputation as descriptions of the relative status that companies occupy in an institutional field of rivals and stakeholders. Management scholars describe corporate reputations in one of two main ways, including:

In practice, corporate reputations are revealed by the relative rankings of companies created and propagated by information intermediaries. For example, business magazines and newspapers such as Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal regularly publish lists of the best places to work, the best business schools, or the most innovative companies. These rankings are explicit orderings of corporate reputations, and the relative positions of companies on these rankings reflect their relative performance on various cognitive attributes. Corporate reputations are found to influence the attractiveness of ranked companies as suppliers of products, as prospective employers, and as investments. For those reasons, companies themselves have become increasingly involved with the practice of reputation management.