ABSTRACT
In a typical marketplace transaction, for example buying milk in a store, the seller is identified and the buyer is anonymous. Sellers use identifiers like trademarks and brand names to build reputations for their offerings, but mass-market buyers lack countervailing reputational power. To the extent that buyers have reputations, they are those that sellers ascribe to them when they assign them to stylized market segments. The information age, and in particular the progress in storage, transmission, and retrieval of personally individuating information over the past thirty years, is beginning to undermine this historical fact by putting the resources of identity and reputation into buyers’ hands. First came credit cards, which detached buyers’ reputations for creditworthiness from particular retail stores (“store charge cards”) and made them elements of personal, portable identities. Later came loyalty cards to mark buyers’ worth to airlines, hotels, supermarkets, car rental companies, bookstores, movie theaters, photo-finishing chains, ski resorts, and fast-food chains to name just a few. Soon biometrics may liberate buyers from the need to carry cards and make possession of marketplace identities more pervasive and less conspicuous. Digital identity is increasingly a factor to be reckoned with in consumer behavior.
