I am far behind in my C'punks reading and am likely to get farther behind before I catch up, so perhaps this is well-known or dated. However, the recent revival of reputation discussion reminded me of a very interesting claim made by Miller & Drexler in "Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspective" (http://www.webcom.com/~agorics/agorpapers.html). I'll quote from section 4:
... Trademarking of services and products enables producers to establish valuable reputations. The lack of this mechanism in biology [17] contributes to the relative sparseness of symbiosis there.
4.4. Food webs and trade webs
Biological and market ecosystems both contain a mixture of symbiotic and negative-sum relationships. This paper argues that biological ecosystems involve more predation, while idealized market ecosystems involve more symbiosis. Indeed, one can make a case that this is so even for human market ecosystems-that biological ecosystems are, overall, dominated by predation, while market ecosystems are, overall, dominated by symbiosis.
In human markets (as in idealized markets) producers within an industry compete, but chains of symbiotic trade connect industry to industry. Competition in biology likewise occurs most often among those occupying the same niche, but here, it is predation that connects from niche to niche. Because of the lack of reputations and trademarks, symbiosis in biology occurs most often in situations where the "players" find themselves in a highly-iterated game. In the extreme, the symbiotic system itself becomes so tightly woven that it is considered a single organism-as with lichens composed of fungi and algae, or animals composed of eukaryotic cells containing mitochondria. Predation, of course, links one symbiotic island to the next.
Ecology textbooks show networks of predator-prey relationships-called food webs-because they are important to understanding ecosystems; "symbiosis webs" have found no comparable role. Economics textbooks show networks of trading relationships circling the globe; networks of predatory or negative-sum relationships have found no comparable role. (Even criminal networks typically form cooperative "black markets".) One cannot prove the absence of such spanning symbiotic webs in biology, or of negative-sum webs in the market; these systems are too complicated for any such proof. Instead, the argument here is evolutionary: that the concepts which come to dominate an evolved scientific field tend to reflect the phenomena which are actually relevant for understanding its subject matter.
[17] Wickler, Wolfgang, Mimicry in Plants and Animals (World University Library/ MaGraw-Hill, New York, 1968).
This collection of Miller&Drexler papers is very much worth reading if you haven't run across it yet. Ted