Greg Burk writes:
Too little incentive to shoot for the heights:
Suppose you judge that you've accumulated twice as much "reputation capital" as Joe. How do you get twice as much payoff? It seems to me that above the threshhold of credibility, minor side issues make more difference than your two-fold "reputation capital" differential.
Go read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (a good book to read anyway :) and examine the nature of the computer network "discussion groups" he talks about: a classic example of reputation markets in many-to-many discussions. With the proper tools someone with twice the reputation capital in a particular category as another will have a greater chance of what they say not being filtered out as noise.
As an "asset", it is extremely non-liquid:
How exactly would you "convert" your reputation into other capital? Would you accept bribes and tell lies? Seems to me you would only get a one-shot "conversion" and it couldn't possibly hope to equal your investment.
Tell that to Walter Cronkite, Siskel & Ebert, Moody's and others who have converted reputation capital into large piles of money. Time is an asset that has a monetary value to most people, and they are willing to spend money to hear the opinions of sources which they feel have a high reputation in a particular area rather than spending the time necessary to do the research and investigation themselves.
So I think the latter part of the analysis is wishful thinking, or at least restricted to a small subset of subject-matter.
No, I think that you just don't understand the mechanics of reputations and how they interact with the most important resource in most people's lives: time. Instead of thinking of "reputation" look at it from the other end and consider the "attention marketplace." Right now reputation markets have a limited presence on the internet (mostly through killfiles) because the tools required are not integreated into the tools used to browse the information. In time this will change. jim