On 3 Dec 2001, at 13:44, Ken Brown wrote:
All the discussion about certificates of speaking Navajo or whatever are slightly beside the point. If personal reputation, as such, has a market value it isn't the money you'd get by selling the reputation, because as everyone else already pointed out, if you could sell it, it wouldn't really be a reputation.
Well, I thought so, but apparently not everyone does, since there's been a certain amount of discussion as to whether a nym might be sold (with associated reputation) and if so how it might be accomplished.
The market value of a personal reputation is the extra money you could get by selling something else, backed by that reputation.
OK, I like this as the basis of the value of a repuation in the specific context of an entity that sells goods and services. I think the concept of reputation in the sense of, say, something that helps you identify posts worth reading is sufficiently different as to merit separate discussion. But back to your above statement. Obviously the value of the rep isn't the extra you get from a single transaction. Does it seem reasonable to say that the total value of the rep should be the total annual extra you get from having the rep times some constant? I think technically it should be the discounted future value stream, but I think that works out to be pretty much the same thing. George