AcknowledgmentWe would like to thank Tim Pollock and the three anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions and guidance. We would also like to thank Martin Gargiulo, Matteo Prato, Heeyon Kim, Abhijith G. Acharya, Fabrizio Castellucci, Yi Tang, and Francois Collet for their valuable feedback, as well as participants at presentations at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and at Singapore Management University. We would also like to express our gratitude for the financial support we have received from the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research 2 THE ART OF REPRESENTATION: HOW AUDIENCE-SPECIFIC REPUTATIONS AFFECT SUCCESS IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART FIELD ABSTRACTWe study the effects of actors' audience-specific reputations on their levels of success with different audiences in the same field. Extending recent work that has emphasized the presence of multiple audiences with different concerns, we demonstrate that considering audience specificity leads to an improved understanding of reputation effects. Using data on emerging artists in the field of contemporary art from 2001 to 2010, we investigate the manner in which artists' audience-specific reputations affect their subsequent success with two distinct audiences: museums and galleries. Our findings suggest that audience-specific reputations have systematically different effects with respect to success with museums and galleries. Our findings also illuminate the extent to which audience-specific reputations are relevant for emerging research on the contingent effects of reputation. In particular, our findings support our predictions that audiences differ from one another in terms of the extent to which other signals (specifically, status and interaction with other audiences) enhance or reduce the value of audience-specific reputations. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence for the value of incorporating audience-specific reputations into the general study of reputation.3

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The association between quality assessment and status attainment is fundamental in the sociology of markets. However, past literature failed to explain status dynamics such as mobility in the status order where highly uncertain goods make quality hard to measure. This paper contributes to the understanding of this relationship by identifying various social mechanisms behind quality evaluation processes. It also explores why certain products are considered to be more valuable than others. The results demonstrate that only through exchange relations and active participation in the marketplace (what I call status actions) can actors affect the social definition of what are perceived as high-quality products. The results also provide evidence of two major market outcomes: conservativism and centralization. The findings improve understanding of the evolution and dynamics of status in uncertain markets from both micro-and macro-sociology of markets. These processes are illustrated in a study of the art market in Israel.

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