Image Building

B. Curtis Eaton () and William D. White

No 2008-30, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Calgary

Abstract: We humans engage in a lot of costuming that can often be interpreted as type communication. Uniforms are the obvious example (cops on the beat, for example, wear uniforms because they want us to know that they are cops), but there are many other examples. This paper models costuming, or image building, as type communication. At the heart of the analysis is a model of social interaction in which information concerning the type of the people with whom we interact is mutually valuable - that is, valuable to them and to us. We first examine the equilibria of an image building game in which players choose their costumes and then engage in a series of social interactions in which their costumes might serve as type signals. Obviously, there are as many perfect signaling equilibria as there are ways to assign costumes to player types, so the image building game has a very nasty coordination problem. We look at two ways in which this problem might be solved. First we look for salient, history dependent costume replacement strategies in a dynamic image building game with imperfectly durable costumes. Then we examine the possibility that the firms who make and sell costumes can solve the coordination problem through image advertising. Image advertising as we conceive of it has a number of interesting features that distinguish it from other forms of advertising.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-mkt
Date: 2008-01-28, Revised 2008-01-28
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.ucalgary.ca/sites/econ.ucalgary.ca/fil ... mageBuildingAAAA.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Image Building (1992)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:clg:wpaper:2008-30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Calgary
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by May Ives ().