I'd just add to what UnitOmega is saying. Basically, and this is something that sadly happens often in RPGs, we're mistaking system with setting. In the rule-wise mechanical system that EP uses, rep works somewhat like money. It has to, as we need an abstraction to measure when our players can get X or Y in a rep economy in a way that it's trackable and can be worked out with reasonable simplicity. But this "system" is a massive game serving abstraction of what's really going on "in universe". In universe rep is fluffy, it probably changes from habitat to habitat, in some it will work like a reputation based money system, in others, it will be sharing a communaly owned pile of resources between all the members of a hab. There's just too many examples and the game master will have to try and "fit" the provided rules with all these situations. Now, back to the original question of the OP, the answer is a rather unhelpful "it depends". In some habs if you carry your weight around and do jobs to help the hab as a whole, you'll be in high rep standing even if you are an antisocial person that locks themselves up 90% of the time and does not respond well to unwanted approaches. In other habs the same person might be have a rep of almost 0 because the hab "expects" its members to be active social participants and not being an active social member of the comunity is seen as a massive protocol breach and no amount of hard work will clear that negative rep.

Damnit, I go away for a couple of weeks and the interesting threads come out :P As I understand it, Rep isn't a currency per se, simply because you can't actually "buy" anything with it - it's nothing more than a measure of one's "trustworthiness". When someone looks at your rep score, they're using your record of past actions to evaluate whether to make a deal with you or send you packing. Yes you can burn rep to "buy" things, but that's not you saying "I will give you rep for your product", rather it's you either reneging on deals, acting shady so people get nervous, or generally being "greedy". To use your example of a Worker in a company, in a pure rep-economy they wouldn't be getting payed in rep at all - they may get a bonus to his rep for being gainfully employed, but that would be a constant modifier for the duration of their employment rather than a constant influx, and almost certainly would not come from the employer. If the worker gets "payed" at all, it's going to be in goods or services - work in a feedstock refinery and you get to take some home at the end of the shift, over and above the basic ration everyone gets. That's not to say it's perfect. Quite the contrary, it's an societal model typified by the stereotypical American Highschool Cafeteria, or possibly suburban gated communities, with all the bile, politics and petty cruelty that comes with them. However, they also aren't anything new. It's just a codification of something that already exists. Which again brings us back to the OP. Having a mental disorder is in some ways not nearly as bad as is could be, in part there are going to be people willing to provide analysis/care/psychosurgical treatment in order to bump their standing in the community, but mostly because "I want to cure my condition to be more socially acceptable" is the kind of thing Anarchist communities would likely treat for "free" because doing so makes their lives/community better. On the other hand, those of us who are simply private, introverted, socially awkward or subject to gossip/rumor are screwed. Best case we get kicked out, worst case we get mind-twirked as they try to "fix" us of the terrible disorder of liking solitude.

I'll just add a few thoughts that I've not seen expressed so far. They are opinions, so I'm not trying to convince anyone.

Tango wrote:

If rep is the only thing that determines your access to resources in a moneyless society, then it is money.

In some sense yes. It does control access to scarce resources. More rep will mean access to more scarce resources, and obviously accessing scarce resources will reduce how many *additional* scarce resources you can access given your rep. But in other ways money and rep are very different. Here are just two big differences. The first is that rep, or rather reps, because there are many different types, tend to deal with one specific environment of goods/services/stuff. A specific rep economy arises when the majority of the folks caring about a certain environment of things - say, science, or media celebrity, or criminal power - have that class of things as the primary asset they deal in and care about. A currency for that stuff (a stuff-rep) then naturally arises as a means to accurately gauge and safely accumulate value *within* the field, even when the stuff in the field might be hard to gauge and can fluctuate wildly compared to stuff outside of the field. Even in today's world, if you are really, really obsessed by math, particularly if you already receive some basic income that provides for the necessities of life, you will engage in a complex economy of math rep - collaborating with other authors, promoting your ideas/students/papers, maneuvering to get into this editorial board or into that program committee. How much money is it worth to you getting a certain math result, or having an article published in a certain journal? You'll hardly know, nor will your colleagues. But everyone in your field will be able to gauge fairly accurately and consistently the relative value, to a certain person, of getting article X into journal Y vs. that of being called into editorial board Z. And most of you will care much more about that than about money (or media celebrity, or criminal power). The second crucial difference is that reps accumulate/dissipate violating many of the basic laws of followed by money. One example. One person can always transfer money to another, all the way up to the amount he owns; and the amount he loses is the amount the other gains. This is not (always) true of rep. If you have a high academic reputation, you may only be able to transfer a small amount of it to others, and the amount transfered probably costs you less than they gain (though sometimes more), and can vary wildly depending on whom you are dealing with. Different reps may have different rules in this regard. This is not an aspect well-modeled by the EP mechanics. Let me now comment on the OP. I think it's incorrect to think that being charming and sociable will necessarily help you more in a rep economy than in a traditional one. Note that even in a traditional economy being charming and sociable helps: you gain more career contacts, you can generally inflate to a certain extent the value of what you sell in the eyes of others, and you might get to marry the boss's daughter. In some rep economies (say, media celebrity?) it will probably help even more. In some (academics?) about the same as in a traditional economy. In others (maybe criminal cartels?) probably less. I also tend to think it's incorrect to say that rep economies are more "post-scarcity" and more about fairer, more "socialist" societies. Oh no. It's just that they tend to be about some other special_stuff (that admittedly people can afford caring about only after their basic needs are met, so they are post-scarcity in this sense), so people tend to be less greedy and obsessed and more uniformly poor when looking at money, because they don't prize money as much as special_stuff, and reserve to special_stuff all their greed. People in a special_stuff economy will also tend to give away money relatively freely when it can gain them special_stuff, so to an outside observer who does not understand special_stuff they appear generous and nice and somewhat eccentric people. But it's not exactly like that. The academic who will gladly loan you half his house, or will just leave to his brother the family's multibillion company in exchange for a small stipend, that same man will begrudge, lose sleep on, and fight toe and nail over having his name appear third rather than second in the author list of a given article. One may wonder how @-rep and c-rep enter this picture. What's the special_stuff that drives participants in these economies in the same way that academic reputation drives academics and criminal power drives criminals? It's easier for c-rep; it's ... social standing in a way very similar to what we understand today, and that we understood better a century ago. It's the thing that in decades past made, and in large strata of society still makes, a white woman prefer marriage to a poor white man than to a rich black man; to a man working for the government or the army for a moderate stipend, than to a man making vast profits from managing brothels; to a man whose family is poor, but has been wealthy and respected for centuries, than to one who is rich but was descended from generations of beggars and slaves and criminals; to a poor upright christian, than to a rich brilliant satanist. It's also what a mayor, a governor, and the president and (to a lesser extent) every member of the local golf-club or college fraternity gains. It's what you gain by doing the "right" things, and what you lose catastrophically by not doing them. And it's what will get you invited to parties where no amount of money will get you invited, and your children admitted to schools where no amount of money will get them admitted, and your parents buried in graveyards where no amount of money will get them buried. @-rep? Similar thing, but in a society that's located elsewhere and has different values; values it considers better and smarter than those of c-reppers, just as c-reppers consider their own better and smarter. There's one fundamental difference though. c-reppers live in an intrinsecally more complex society, where c-rep and money are both used and both needed (in different proportions) for various endeavours, much like it was, say, for upper strata of European society a century ago. They earn and spend the two in different ways, and must make sure they do fall short on neither. @-reppers live in a simpler society where anything that can be "purchased" can be purchased through @-rep alone.

Dr. Maxwell hit on a couple of good points. Rep works inside a scum habitat because it is a small self contained community. I agree it is fine there in general. But small is a key word. Rep only works with shared values. Once the community is large enough to allow subgroups to form they will eventually come into conflict. I also agree with others that social outliers will be punished because I feel humans are horrible at properly evaluating risk/reward and evaluating relative merit on things they don't understand. but those that are punished will be the social outliers of the community by definition. as long as the community doesn't lose a uniquely skilled individual, the community probably doesn't mind if they leave. Where rep-only economies are incapable of functioning are the interfaces with the external universe. Habs are not entirely self contained. Fusion reactors need hydrogen. Atmosphere slowly leaks through the hull. Stellar wind ablates hulls. Populations grow. Positioning thrusters need reaction mass. Outside of Mars, your hab will need supplies just to keep the air breathable or to keep a solid surface under your feet. You have to import materials in most places. Gas giant habs need rocks and asteroid habs need gasses. So what are you exporting and how do you value it? What about items you could fab, eventually, but you need it quickly? How do you value opportunity costs? Sometimes, time itself is the scarce resource. What happens when entity A really likes/needs your export but you need something from entity B? Three way exchanges are inefficient. Ultimately you require a currency system and a market. I think the ultimate commodity underlying currency exchanges will be energy. Fabbing an item with a cm requires power. Getting the raw materials to the hab take power. With the exception of rare minerals, the bottleneck for the infinite wall of dcms are the power needs to run them. The value of a jovian gravity slingshot is measured in fuel savings. Inside the neosocialist scum hab, rep may be the way resources are managed, but ultimately a currency will be required for trade.

Ho boy, this thread. The ride never ends does it? :P

A lot of what you are talking about is automated in the setting. Not all, but a lot.

I re-read the Reputation section of the sourcebook, and it strongly intimates that your character sheet rep score to a visible score in-game, like the Credit and F***ability of Super Sad True Love Story (in the novel, everyone's smart device had an app which would immediately show everyone else's spending power and attractiveness as culled from social media). I would say that this is a bad way to think of rep, and everyone who says "you can't run an economy off some randomly fluctuating social media number" is absolutely correct. Except as some sort of crazy commune thought experiment, nobody would provide or not provide goods or services based solely on a community-assigned social media score. Let's sever the link. Whatever you see in game fiction when your character calls up an AR app showing my standing with autonomists, whatever that purports to be, that in-game score is not actually my @-rep. My @-rep should be a deeply abstracted for making the game fun purposes measure of various reciprocal social obligations with people in the Autonomist community. While it in part is determined by information transmitted over social networks, it's also representing some variant of long-standing human traditions of "hospitality" or reciprocal gift-giving, etc. which will vary from habitat to habitat. But if I use @-rep, I might be relying on mostly non-electronic ties of culture and kinship, especially if mesh access in an area sucks. In order for Networking in the game to be fun and useful, it's a lot broader than might be plausible in "real life," so yes, with a good roll someone who knows your friend's cousin's cousin on social media will trust you enough on the basis of that link to sell you a kilogram of antimatter at wholesale or whatever. But that's because this is a game, not an anthropology class simulation of reciprocal social obligations among self-identified interest groups.