According to a Wired article by Chris Anderson
the "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads).

All I want to do is unfuzz (model) those two economies and make that academic department.

The Future of Reputation or how your real reputation is affected by online behaviour. The first chapter mentions the "dog poop girl". She failed to clean up after her dog on a train. While her identity is not important her real-life reputation from the online behaviour of others was so influential that she was forced to drop out of university.

Building Trust On-Line: The Design of Reliable Reputation Reporting Mechanisms for Online Trading Communities has some interesting ideas in the "future research" section.