The role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the study of cooperation in the early eighties. However, despite important advances in the study of cooperation networks, no explicit theory of the cognitive ingredients and processes which reputation is made of was provided, and Reputation is still viewed simply as an attribute in the decision for partner selection.

Reputation, instead, deserves a full role as a scientific topic, with focus on its specificities, as the potential as preventive social knowledge, and the selective mechanism of transmission.

More recently, reputation and gossip started to become crucial in many fields of the social sciences, for example organisation science and management, governance, business ethics, etc. where the importance of branding became visible. In these domains, reputation has soon become an intangible asset. The economic reading of the issue at hand implied an extension of reputation to super-individual levels, requiring a still wanting conceptual clarification and interdisciplinary investigation.

In addition, reputation is increasingly at the centre of attention in many fields of science and domains of application, including but not reduced to economics, organisations science, policy-making, (e-)governance, cultural evolution, social dilemmas, socio-dynamics, innofusion, etc. However, there is a great deal of ad hoc models, and little integration of instruments for the implementation, management and optimisation of reputation. On one hand, entrepreneurs and administrators deem it possible to manage corporate and firm reputation without contributing to or accessing a solid, general and integrated body of scientific knowledge on the subject matter. On the other hand, software designers believe they can design and implement online reputation reporting systems without investigating what the properties, requirements and dynamics of reputation in natural societies and why it did evolve for.

In the view of the organisers of this conference, reputation is an old artefact for answering a new challenge, and that is the regulation of complex, global, electronic societies. Innovation demands that the potential of old instruments are fully understood and exploited, in order to be incorporated into novel, intelligent technologies.