Even in this hypothetical scenario, Ada had to pass all of the requirements to be an eligible driver. However, without the ability to purchase reputation, Ada would have been stuck building up her reputation from scratch, despite having saved up adequate collateral elsewhere. Even though she hadn’t invested time into the platform, she still had incentive to be a good driver since she otherwise would have lost the money she had worked hard for. In the case that she couldn’t sell the reputation when she was done using it, the reputation would remain locked in the platform. Since the reputation would go to waste, Ada would be incented to abuse the platform to make the most of her excess reputation. Abuse can take shape in many forms and is platform dependent; but this incentive to “cash out” the reputation through abuse inevitably cancels out the benefit to the platform that the reputation provided in the first place. In practice, it may be useful to annotate the source of reputation for optional discrimination. It’s up to each individual to decide if they value purchased reputation equivalently to reputation received directly from the source. It may be some time before users are comfortable with transferable reputation so annotating reputation origin is a practical first step.
