Paul Resnick has an interesting post from last year (spotted on populicious) summarizing and commenting on a paper describing a class of situations in which reputation systems are unambiguously bad:

Ely, Jeffrey C., Fudenberg , Drew and Levine, David K., “When is Reputation Bad?” (May 2004). Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 2035. http://ssrn.com/abstract=566822

Related posts:

1. Business Week on online reputations: Web attack
2. Northrop Grumman buys Tucana’s IP, will support Kowari
3. Aether Systems, once Baltimore’s dot.com favorite, leaving city
4. OWL-S Submission Published at W3C
5. RAEng report on Social, legal and ethical issues of autonomous systems