Abstract We introduce a framework so that communities can exchange reputation information about agents in environments where agents are migrating between communities. We view the acquisition of the reputation information as a purchase and focus on the design of a payment function to facilitate the payment for information in a way that motivates communities to truthfully report reputation information for agents. We prove that in our proposed framework, honesty is the optimal policy and demonstrate the value of using a payment-function approach for the exchange of reputation information about agents between communities in multiagent environments. Using our payment function, each community is strengthened: it is able to reason more effectively about which agents to accept and can enjoy agents that are motivated to contribute strongly to the benefifit of the community