Higher education institutions are facing increased national and international competition for research talent and research funds (OECD, 2009). The best way for a university to react to this situation is to foster its reputation. Not only for firms (Raithel & Schwaiger, 2015), but also for universities, reputation is one of the most valuable intangible assets (Albers, 2015). Therefore, this study investigates the drivers of business school reputation as perceived by academics. The impact of the following potential drivers is analyzed in this study: research performance, third-party research funds and standing of professors within the academic community. We used the variable research reputation from the business school ranking of the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE) as a proxy for reputation. In addition, also the variable sum of third-party funds was available from the CHE dataset. Furthermore, we measured professors’ standing in the academic community by considering if they are outstanding members in the two major German research communities and if they are in the editorial board of one of the A+ or A ranked journals according to the vhb-jourqual ranking. Moreover, we measured research performance by means of the score of the faculty achieved in the Handelsblatt Rankings Faculties as well by means of the publication output per faculty member. Besides, the previous score of the CHE ranking was included to control for path dependency of reputation (Gray & Balmer, 1998). As additional control variables, the size of the business school, the research reputation of the host university (measured as the number of Nobel-price winners from the university) and the size of the city (measured by the number of inhabitants) were used. Research performance as measured by the Handelsblatt Ranking accounts for 31% of current reputational assessment. The influence of third-party funds as well as professors’ standing within the academic community could not be confirmed. Moreover, city size was found to be correlated to reputation. The obvious explanation would be that large cities are able to attract better researchers (be it for quality of life or because universities in large cities offer more attractive compensation schemes), which in turn leads to a higher research productivity – an important driver for academics’ reputational assessments of a business school.

This paper aims to narrow the gap in research on the impact of universities’ digitalization on reputational assessments by students. A measurement for perception of universities digital advancement (PDA) is developed and integrated in a model to explain university reputation and students’ WoM behavior. Results highlight the importance of the PDA.