Reputation: Difference between revisions

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search
 
(5 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown)
Line 159: Line 159:


See also our entry on [[Trust Metrics]]
See also our entry on [[Trust Metrics]]
==Stack Overflow==
Rachel Botsman:
'Stack Overflow reports more than 24 million unique visitors a month and around 5,500 questions are submitted to the site every day.
Voting on and editing questions are just two ways in which users can earn reputation points on Stack Overflow. "Reputation is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you are talking about," Spolsky says. "The reason why the site is 100 per cent spam-free and that around 80 per cent of all questions get answered is entirely a function of the community. The way we do that is as you earn more reputation points, you get more powers on the site."
Shortly after the site launched, Atwood and Spolsky heard that programmers were putting their Stack Overflow reputation scores on their CVs, and headhunters were searching the platform for developers with specific skills. "A CV tells you what schools they went to, what companies they worked for and how well they did on a standardised test when they were teenagers," Spolsky explains. "But if you read the writings of someone on Stack Overflow, you immediately know if they are a skilled programmer or not." In February 2011, Stack Overflow launched Careers 2.0, an invitation-only job board where companies can find skilled programmers.
Stack Overflow demonstrates how a person's reputation score created in one community is starting to have value beyond the environments where it was built. By answering questions in an expert forum, you create more opportunities to find a better job." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)
==New York-based banking startup Movenbank==
Founder Damelin:
"Credit scores are a lagging indicator -- they only look at what has happened in the past," he says. "They [credit agencies] don't use data to look into whether your behaviour is risky or not now."
Rachel Botsman:
Movenbank's goal is not just to use technology to personalise the banking experience, but to reinvent the traditional risk model. King spent more than 18 years working for traditional banks and was struck by the opacity of much of the credit assessment process. "Most banks reject around 50 per cent of credit applications. It's a pretty strange business when you reject half of your potential customers and don't even tell them why."
At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED. This takes into account an individual's traditional credit score but also aspects such as their level of community involvement, social reputation and trust weighting. Do they have a good eBay rating? Do they send money peer-to-peer? It also measures their social connectivity -- how many friends do they have on Facebook? Who are they connected to on LinkedIn? Do they have an influential Klout score? It combines this data, not just to assess their risk, but to measure the potential value of the customer. If you refer other customers from your network or pay your bills on time, your CRED score will go up. "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.
A big question mark lies around people's readiness to open up their social data, but King believes consumers are willing to make a trade-off if they know how it is going to be used and what they will gain in return." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)


==Applications==
==Applications==
Line 187: Line 217:
Other examples:
Other examples:


- The Flickr interestingness algorhythm at http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/
- The Flickr interestingness algorithm at http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/
 


==Dedicated Reputation Systems==
==Dedicated Reputation Systems==
Line 225: Line 254:
=Discussion=
=Discussion=


==Why Reputation is Important==
See: [[Reputation - Discussion]]


John H. Clippinger on [http://onthecommons.org/node/723 Identity, Reputation, and Social Currency]


"'''Rating and reputation system are a natural and universal artifact of all forms of human cooperation.'''
Reputation Today, by Alison Hearn:


Reputation systems are an especially important aspect of social cooperation because they are attached to an individual and form the basis for whether they can be trusted and accepted. '''A reputation is really the collection of tags that are assigned to an individual or entity to reflect assessments of their competence or status within a specific social network.''' Given that individuals play different roles in social networks - they can serve variously as connectors, gatekeepers, truth-tellers and enforcers - reputations are tied to roles within social networks.
"Reputation is an extremely fluid, contingent, and precarious personal attribute generated entirely by the perception, attention and approval of others. As critic John Rodden argues, building a reputation involves an on-going process of ‘image-making’ and perception management, and, as such, is never given once and for all (Rodden, 2006: 75). Acquiring a reputation begs the question, ‘reputation for what?’ – the answer for which is predicated on a whole host of extremely variable contextual and institutional factors. While historically reputation has been assumed to be a direct reflection of the inherent quality of a person’s work or achievement, these days the acquisition of reputation bears very little relation to any specific skill or accomplishment, but appears to be derived solely from the performance of effective attention-getting itself, by any means necessary (Rodden, 2006: 80), including expressing feelings and opinions online.


In eBay, for example, a seller acquires a reputation score given to them by their buyers. Different reputation score levels not only make it more likely that others will do business with them, but it confers a certain status among other members of the eBay community. To encourage participation, many online games depend upon accumulated scores, levels, roles and ratings of players. So do many peer production undertakings such as Wikipedia, Slashdot and open source software development.
Of course, any notion of the ‘inherent quality’ of a person’s achievement is an historical and cultural construction, as, indeed, is reputation itself. A ‘reputation’ is conditioned and, arguably, constituted by cultural and economic institutions that have the power to authorize and direct attention, and transmute that attention back into value. In other words, reputation is a cultural product, and, as such is conditioned by its mode of production. This mode of production is generally marked by the perennially exploitative relations between labour and capital as well as by other relations of power based on forms of identity such as race, sexuality and gender. In the end, what is produced in the form of a reputation inevitably exceeds the control of those individuals who generate it or the individual who must ‘carry’ it; typically, we are ‘subjected to’ a reputation. As women well know, having born the burden of what Linda Williams has called a ‘surplus aestheticism’ for centuries (1999: 41), visibility and the reputation that follows from it is, most often, a trap (Foucault, 1977).


Reputation systems are, in fact, linked to all aspects of human endeavor - sports with its performance statistics, education with its grades and degrees, social standard with its board and club memberships. Credit scores are a familiar type of reputation system that is now integral not only to receiving credit, but to participating in society and the economy at large. Credit scores are based upon financial behaviors that are thought to predict the likelihood of default or late payment.
Many have argued that this power of authorizing and validating attention, nowadays primarily enacted by the media industries, which can lead to the growth of a profitable reputation, feeds the lack in all individuals, promising, simultaneously, to recognize our uniqueness and assuage our anomie. As Leo Braudy has famously written, reputation and fame are, at least discursively, marked by contradiction - between uniqueness and acceptance, distinction and commonality, and, most of all, the desire for transparency between what one truly is ‘inside’ and what others see and celebrate (Braudy, 1997). Insofar as we collectively make and break reputations through the processes of engaging in, or withholding, identification with others, the rise of the attention or ‘reputation’ economy online can be read as a social symptom - evidence of a significant shift in modalities of the ‘self’ in the West."


It is not difficult to see how important reputation tags are in small traditional societies where once a reputation is acquired, it may be very difficult to change. Honor-based societies depend upon reputation tags as the principal governance mechanism for defining and enforcing a social order. "Honor killings" of a daughter or sister in order to preserve a familiar reputation suggest the power of reputation in Human Nature. Even in online communities, reputation tags are the motivator and governor of behaviors. People take seriously the reputation scores of an eBay seller/buyer, the accumulated scores of a player of online games, or the number of friends and ratings one has in the online social networks of Linkedin, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook, or My Space.
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/structuring-feeling-web-20-online-ranking-and-rating-and-digital-%E2%80%98reputation%E2%80%99-economy)


'''Identity is not something that can be self-defined. It is granted and modulated by one's roles, relationships, and reputations in a variety of social networks. One's identity (whether it be an individual person, group or organization) is closely tied to reputation tags and roles in social networks.''' How you see yourself depends upon how other see and rate you.
=More Informaton=
 
'''Reputation tags affect an individual or group's ability to participate within and across different networks''', thereby becoming the basis for granting/revoking certain privilege and decision rights. Since reputation tags can be measures of competence by a socially credible third party - e.g., religious, educational, financial, political, trade or professional institutions - they play a very powerful role in governing social mobility and enabling/thwarting interactions between different social networks. By providing information about information - who or what it is, where it came from, as well as marking the rights and privileges for accessing, exchanging, altering, or forwarding goods, services and information, tags are the true control points in self-organizing networks."
(http://onthecommons.org/node/723)
 
See what John Clippinger has to say on [[Social Currencies]], from the same essay.
 
 
==Why Reputation may be less important online==
 
Judith Donath:
 
"Reputation is central to community formation and cooperation (Emler 2001; Gluckman 1963; Hardin 2003). Through discussion about others’ actions, people establish and learn about the community’s standards. Reputation is the core of rewards and sanctioning – it amplifies the benefits of behaving well and the costs of misbehavior. If I work with someone who turns out to be lazy and dishonest, by telling my friends about it, they are spared from a similar bad experience. Having access to reputation information is a big benefit of community membership: insiders know who to trust and how to act toward each other, while strangers do not get the benefit of other’s past experiences. Our ability to share reputation information makes society possible (Dunbar 1996).
 
In light of this, it would seem that the answer to the question “Is reputation obsolete?” is “No”.
 
Yet reputation is subject to manipulation, for various reasons. People use it to influence opinion to advance their own causes, to maliciously harm someone, or to curry favor by providing entertaining or seemingly confidential material. We need to understand what circumstances make reputation reliable.
 
Reputation information exchanged within close-knit communities is more reliable, and members learn when assessments are biased. A colleague recently mentioned that she would never trust another recommendation letter from Professor X again – she’d seen too many in which he claimed that different students were “the top scholar I’ve known”. In overzealously promoting the careers of his students, Professor X acquired a poor reputation for inflated praising. Most letter writers temper the desire to over-enthusiastically praise in order to remain credible in the eyes of their peers, realizing that this close-knit community assesses the assessors. Without community ties, reputation is generally less useful. On public rating sites such as eBay, where no community binds the rater and the reader of ratings, there is no check on reliability and the ratings function primarily as a social exchange between the rater and subject (David & Pinch 2006).
 
So, is reputation obsolete in an increasingly archival world? The answer, it appears, is “sometimes”. When the immediate facts are primary, we should make use of the vast amount of archived material available. But when situations are ambiguous, when there are conflicting versions of events or codes of behavior, and when developing a shared culture is important (Merry 1997), reputation and the communicative, community-building process of creating it is far from obsolete.
 
Online, new factors affect the balance between reputation and history. One big issue is “portable identity”: if I spend countless hours on a site being a gracious and well-informed companion, shouldn’t I be able to take that personal history and reputation with me to another site? Many would argue yes, that “you own your own words”. (More controversial is the question of whether you *must* take your history with you: people prefer to port only positive pasts.) But porting reputation is a different matter. Your reputation is information about you, but it is not by you. If you own your own words, then your reputation is owned not by you, but by the people who talk about you. Furthermore, it is a subjective judgment made it a specific context that may not translate well into another. History is portable in ways that reputation is not.
 
An online site can encourage reliance on history by making search easy and by providing visualizations of patterns within its archive. Or it can encourage the use of reputation by providing both public and private communication channels, as well as feedback about the value of the reputation information people have provided. In technologically mediated societies, evaluating the relative merits of history and reputation is especially important, for the habits of such communities are shaped by deliberate design."
(http://publius.cc/2008/10/17/donath-is-reputation-obsolete/)
 
==Reputation is not a collective right==
 
Peter St. Andre argues that reputation is not socially constructed, not tied to collective rights over the individual, but an emergent property of the network:
 
"It is true that all individuals who wish to productively interact within a community benefit from the existence of reputation as a signalling mechanism; but that does not mean that reputation is a matter of collective interest or group belonging. Reputational signals are used always by individuals within a community and make it easier for those individuals to decide with whom to interact. Thus the benefits of reputational effects are dispersed among all members of the community. But it is a serious error of reification to therefore conclude that the group or community or collective realizes benefits, possesses rights, or pursues actions.
 
Consider again the analogy to prices. The emergence of prices from economic transactions between buyers and sellers benefits all members of the economic community that is concerned with the product or service at hand (and even members of economic communities concerned with other classes of goods and services, whose prices in turn are affected by the prices of goods and services in the first community). But prices are not therefore the property of all the economic actors in that community, they are not a collective creation of the community, and the group does not have rights to those prices. The same is true of reputation, and it is critically important to recognize the emergent nature of reputation if we are not to be led astray into notions of collective rights that will be inimical to individual participation in online communities."
(https://stpeter.im/?p=1427)
 
For a counter-argument see Beth Noveck's [[Creating a Legal Framework for Online Identity]].
 
 
==How the Internet changed Reputation Systems==
 
Lucio Picci [http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/picci/index.html]:
 
"In this respect, the Internet innovates in three important ways, by allowing what Dellarocas (2003) defines the word–of–mouth.”
 
First, it allows to spread voice–of–mouth to an unprecedented level. This, in turn, permits the existence of reputation–based interactions — be them of the market type, or other — at a global level and among persons many degrees of separation apart.
 
Secondly, the presence of a digital information infrastructure allows for a careful engineering of many details that contribute to the overall outcome of the system, such as: The condition under which the assessments are made, the metric according to which they aggregate to form a reputation index, the rules for participating and the possibility of changing one’s identity, etc.
 
Third, the Internet democratizes reputation systems, because it allows for their design so that all relevant parties may play the game under similar conditions. In conventional contexts information on reputation mostly spreads informally and via social networks: people who are better placed within them are at an advantage because they obtain better information. This, in turn, creates an incentive to spend time and resources to place oneself within such advantaged networks, a socially wasteful activity that economists would define as “rent seeking”."
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/picci/index.html)
 
 
==Measuring Reputation==
 
Rachel Botsman:
 
"Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation. In 2008, Norihiro Sadato, a researcher at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Aichi, Japan, along with a team of colleagues, wanted to determine whether we think about reputation and money in the same way, by mapping the neural response to different rewards. "Although we all intuitively know that a good reputation makes us feel good, the idea that good reputation is a reward has long been just an assumption in social sciences," Sadato says. "There has been no scientific proof."
 
In order to prove his hypothesis, Sadato devised an experiment: participants were told they were playing a simple gambling game, in which one of three cards would result in a cash payout. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity triggered when the subjects received a monetary reward. When the subjects returned on the second day, they were each shown a picture of their face, with a one-word descriptor underneath that a panel of strangers had supposedly written about them. Some of the descriptions were positive, such as "trustworthy", others neutral, such as "patient", and others negative. When participants heard they had a positive reputation, a part of the brain, the striatum, lit up.
 
The same part would also light up if they had won money. As Sadato puts it: "The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
 
Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
 
Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes. The difference between these community-driven marketplaces and e-commerce sites is that they are connecting real people with real names in the offline world. When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
 
"Reputation allows you to bring over some of the history of who you are as a person, whether it's in the digital or the real world," says Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, the peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people with space to rent with those looking for accommodation. "What has surprised me the most about reputation is that the need for it actually goes down as the marketplace matures."
 
In other words, a host's or a guest's reputation gets users comfortable with trusting the idea (staying in or renting the homes of complete strangers), trusting the system (Airbnb) and trusting the recipient. "By the time a host has their 20th guest on Airbnb, they start blindly accepting people. They don't need to talk on the phone or need lots of information," he explains. "You start trusting people. So really what we are doing is not just renting out spaces but helping to change the way people trust humanity."
 
Chesky is aware of the value of the data users are building on Airbnb. "The platforms that will become the centrepiece of online reputation are the ones that create some kind of meaningful relationships, and carry the data on defining who you really are as a person," says the 30-year-old. He believes, however, that Airbnb has a trust currency that is "super interesting for others because the transactions are in person and not just online. We capture data about people's real-world behaviours that could not be captured on any other website."
 
But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy? "I know we are creating a really important currency that could be useful outside of Airbnb," Chesky says." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)
 
 
==The ten-step reputation plan==
 
Rachel Botsman:
 
"Want to be a trusted member of the online community? Follow these tips on building your reputation capital.
 
Be a maven: Demonstrate your knowledge on something -- music, maths, movies -- on MavenSay, Mahalo or StackExchange.


Get tagging: Use a platform such as Skills.to to tag your strengths and make it easy for others to know at a glance what you can do.
A thoughtful and recent analysis from 2025:


Become super at something: Be a great host, runner, seller, renter, lender, in an online marketplace such as Airbnb, WhipCar or Zopa.
* '''Status Games: Social Media and the Gamification of Value. By Samuel Vance-Law.'''


Build a portfolio: Make a note of references, ratings and reviews on various platforms that give a snapshot of your online value.
URL = https://thedrcenter.org/blog-status-games/?
 
Collect trusted opinions: Ask people who know and trust you to write about your skills and trustworthiness on platforms such as LinkedIn.
 
Follow, like, befriend: Concentrate on building a deep social network on at least one platform. Interact, follow and "like" on a daily basis.
 
Review and recommend: Get your name out there: be active in writing reviews and vouching for friends and colleagues on a range of websites.
 
Monetise your profile: Build some kind of virtual currency account, whether it's Linden Dollars, Gold Coins, IMVU or Facebook Credits.
 
Spring clean your reputation: Use a service such as Reputation.com or Veribo to clean up any misleading or false information about you.
 
Gain some social capital: Become an active part of your local community and demonstrate you are trustworthy in your personal life." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)
 
=More Informaton=


* on the relationship between money and reputation as different form of 'currencies': http://reputationcurrents.com/blog/archives/7
* on the relationship between money and reputation as different form of 'currencies': http://reputationcurrents.com/blog/archives/7
* Negative feedback reputation systems have been shown mathematically to always spiral into chaos [http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/02/rep-systems/]
* Negative feedback reputation systems have been shown mathematically to always spiral into chaos [http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/02/rep-systems/]
* [[Ranking and Rating]]


Also:  
Also:  

Latest revision as of 10:38, 23 October 2025

= Reputation — as tokens, achievement markers, certifications and many more — is the primary information system that coordinate the flows of trust through the social sphere. [1]

Definition

1.

"Reputation is a summary of one's past actions within ... a specific community, presented in a manner that can help other community members to make decisions... whether and how to relate to the individual"

– Chrysanthos Dellarocas [2]


2.

"Reputation-based systems are used to establish trust among members of on-line communities where parties with no prior knowledge of each other use the feedback from their peers to assess the trust worthiness of the peers in the community." (http://whatifacomputerlies.blogspot.com/2007/04/reputation-system-in-p2p-network.html)

See also our entry on Reputation - Portability

Please note this important distinction by Tom Salfield: "I think its important to distinguish "currency" from a reputation measurement. Implicit in the term currency is the idea that it can be exchanged for something. A system for "recognition" is only a currency if that recognition is exchangable for something." (email, June 2010)

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as business, online communities or social status.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organisations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilisations). It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation)

From Michael Freedman et al:

"Reputation is a tool to predict behavior based on past actions and characteristics. We use reputation regularly in our daily lives --- reputations of individuals, as when we choose a physician; groups, as when we decide that individuals above a certain age can be trusted to purchase alcohol; and collective entities, as when we decide whether Ford is a company that will sell us good cars.

Reputation is based on linkability. When we can link actions to an identity, and link actions by that identity to other actions by that same identity, then we can begin to make predictions about the identity's future actions. We distinguish between the problem of verification (establishing identity and tying it to a real-world entity) and the problem of reputation (judging the behavior of a given identity). This chapter deals mainly with the latter, but we also tackle some of the problems with verification that impact reputation.

The concept of reputation, and the associated themes of building and assessing reputations, are not in themselves new ideas. Reputation, often signaled via a brand such as the New York Times, is an important concept in environments in which there is asymmetric information. Newspapers are a good example -- a reader must pay for the good before evaluating the good, and the seller and publisher likely have better information about the quality of the product. Without the ability to brand a product the newspaper market would likely spiral towards Akerlof's "Market for Lemons", with high quality products unable to differentiate themselves from low quality products and only low quality products surviving in the long-term. Reputation provides what Axelrod refers to as "the shadow of the future", with participants in a system considering the effect of current misbehavior on future interactions, even if future interactions are with different people. Reputation systems (systems that attempt to attach reputation to an identity and make an ongoing assessment of that reputation) promise to "unsqueeze the bitter lemon" (Resnick et al. 2000) by automating word-of-mouth reputation for electronic networks." (http://freehaven.net/~arma/jean.html)


Characteristics of Reputation

1. From: Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang


URL = http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html


"Reputation is context–specific. A Ph.D. degree, medical license, or award of merit is meant to certify particular abilities. When a credit agency evaluates your financial history and generates a reputation, the context is your ability to repay loans; this ability may be correlated with but is quite distinct from more general character traits. And reputation could refer to any of these more general traits, like one’s sense of humor or ability to work in a team.

Since there is no absolute objective reputation quantity stamped on people’s foreheads, measurable proxies are necessary, such as book sales rankings, citations in academic papers, Web site visits, and readership of blogs. (Not coincidentally, they have similar highly asymmetric power–law distributions. Many distributions of wealth and of readership of non-electronic resources also follow power–law distributions, a fact noted in Zipf (1949) more than half a century ago.)

Reputation is a surrogate — a partial reflection representing our "best educated guess" of the underlying true state of affairs. Active evaluation by looking behind surface signals can corroborate or disprove reputations, while indiscriminate use degrades their reliability. The challenge is to encourage active evaluation, but also to use it efficiently since it will always be in limited supply.

Emerging information tools are making it possible for people to rate each other on a variety of traits, generating what is really a whole set of reputations for each person. (Information technology is also indirectly increasing the need for such reputations, as we have to sift through more and more possibilities.) You may mentally assign a friend a bad reputation for being on time or returning borrowed items promptly, while still thinking them reliable for helping out in case of real need. No person can be reduced to a single measure of "quality."

So people will have different reputations for different contexts. But even for the same context, people will often have different reputations as assessed by different judges. None of us is omniscient — we all bring our various weaknesses, tastes, bias, and lack of insight to bear when rating each other. And people and organizations often have hidden agendas, leading to consciously distorted opinions.

Reputations are rarely formed in isolation — we influence each others’ opinions. Studying the structure of social connectivity promises to reveal insights about how we interact, and thinking about simple quantities like the average number of sources consulted before an opinion is formed will help us to better filter these opinions.

Are reputations only for people? No, their scope is far wider:


  • They can be for groups of people: companies, media sources, non–governmental organizations, fraternities, political movements.
  • They are often used for inanimate objects: books, movies, music, academic papers, consumer products. Typically, whenever we talk about the "quality" of an object with some degree of subjectivity, we can also speak of its reputation, usually as assessed by multiple users — bestseller lists are a simple example.
  • Finally, ideas can have reputations. Belief systems, theories, political ideas, and policy proposals are the bedrock of public discussion. The waxing and waning of idea–reputations directly affects their likelihood of implementation, and thus the environment that we all share

(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html)


Typical characteristics of reputation system

Albert Cañigueral:

“One of keys to success for collaborative consumption and sharing initiatives is that the hassle factor of engaging in such activities has been reduced to a minimum through the use of technology. Therefore, the reputation system needs to be complete, but simple enough for regular use.

Highlight five of the Rachel Botsman list of issues to consider when designing a peer-to-peer reputation system:

Competition: We love being at the top of the heap. Publish your user rankings to create healthy competition among peers.

Quality: Celebrate and reward users who take the time to contribute quality feedback; they should become the benchmark for others.

Sticky ratings: Pick a primary scoring system (stars, ticks, tiers, thumbs, badges, numerical ratings) and give the ratings sticky names, such as “Power Seller”.

People like me: We like to know, and tend to value, what our friends and people like us think of other people. Integrate “inner-circle” vouching mechanisms (for example, went to the same school, work in the same office) into your reputation system.

Peer-police: An open reputation system must be peer-policed but if things do go wrong, your organization needs to be on hand quickly to offer support, resolve disputes and weed out the vandals and abusers.

"Reputation is a summary of one's past actions within ... a specific community, presented in a manner that can help other community members to make decisions... whether and how to relate to the individual" – Chrysanthos Dellarocas One can not forget that business practices, trust and reputation do not work the same way for different people from different cultures. Qifang, the Chinese peer-to-peer lending platform, which caters to students, has lowered default rates by cleverly leveraging cultural norms by requesting borrowers to provide family details, so they'll feel pressure not to shame the family name.” (http://shareable.net/blog/can-i-trust-you-really-the-reputation-currency-0)

See also: Reputation Banks

Design Characteristics

  1. See Table 1 and 2 at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html
  2. The Reputation Design Pattern Library by Yahoo is stellar.


General Definition

From http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/005829.php:

"trust metric = an attempt to measure, assign, and convey trustworthiness among millions of strangers. As you might expect, most trust metrics work on two primary variables:

1) the evidence of your actions in the on-line space (the comments you post, the time you spend reading or participating, the transactions you complete, etc.) and

2) the assessment by other people of that evidence (did you say something smart, did you deliver the product you promised, or did you not, etc.)." (http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/005829.php)

Technical Definition

From the Open Privacy project:


"Reputation: A value that represents the collective opinion of some reference. A reputation is really just another name for an Opinion, as it is the calculated opinion of a Reference by the issuing Reputation Calculation Engine. Reputations are ephemeral, and the weight applied to an Opinion representing the reputation of some Reference is subjectively applied by the end user (person or program) that requests it. As Principals add their Opinion to a Reference, it accrues (positive or negative) reputation capital that has several useful properties:

Secure: Reputations cannot be subverted, and the source of reputation assertions can always be traced. This provides non-repudiation as well as the mechanism with which to decide which reputation information to trust.

Transitive: Reputations are transitive (within the constraints of a well-defined domain). For example, if A trusts B as a source of local news, and B trusts C for local news, then it could be determined that A trusts C for local news." (http://www.openprivacy.org/opd.shtml)

Important Design Considerations

"online reputation systems must consider several issues:


  • How broad is the context we're trying to build a reputation for? Are we trying to predict how well a given person will perform at a very specific task (eg delivering a letter to the post office), or are we trying to predict his performance at a broad range of tasks such as delivering letters, running a company, and babysitting our kids?
  • What's at stake? Are we talking about predicting whether he'll put a stamp on his envelope, or whether he'll betray our government's secrets?
  • Can we tie people to their online identities, or is it possible for people to create many online identities that are not obviously related to each other?
  • Assuming we've solved the issue of tying identities to real people, how can we measure reputation?
  • Finally, what algorithms can let us make accurate predictions based on these reputation values?"

(http://freehaven.net/~arma/jean.html)


Reputation in P2P Systems

"Generally the reputation system in P2P network follows four steps.

Step 1: a requestor r locates available resources sending a broadcast Query message to ask for the files it needs to download. Other peers will answer with a QueryHit message to the requesting node to notify that they have the requested resource.

Step 2: Upon receiving a set of QueryHit messages, r selects an offerer o and polls the community for any available reputation information on o sending a Poll message. As a result of step 2, r receives a set V of votes, some of which express a good opinion while others express a bad one.

step 3: revaluates the votes to collapse any set of votes that may belong to a clique and explicitly selects a random set of votes for verifying their trustworthiness.

step 4: the set of reputations collected in step 3 is computed into an aggregated community-wide reputation value. Base on this reputation value, the requestor r can take a decision on whether accessing the resource offered by o or not.After accessing the resource r can update its local trust on o (depending on whether the downloaded resource was satisfactory of not)." (http://whatifacomputerlies.blogspot.com/2007/04/reputation-system-in-p2p-network.html)

Examples of Reputation Systems

See also our entry on Trust Metrics


Stack Overflow

Rachel Botsman:

'Stack Overflow reports more than 24 million unique visitors a month and around 5,500 questions are submitted to the site every day.

Voting on and editing questions are just two ways in which users can earn reputation points on Stack Overflow. "Reputation is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you are talking about," Spolsky says. "The reason why the site is 100 per cent spam-free and that around 80 per cent of all questions get answered is entirely a function of the community. The way we do that is as you earn more reputation points, you get more powers on the site."

Shortly after the site launched, Atwood and Spolsky heard that programmers were putting their Stack Overflow reputation scores on their CVs, and headhunters were searching the platform for developers with specific skills. "A CV tells you what schools they went to, what companies they worked for and how well they did on a standardised test when they were teenagers," Spolsky explains. "But if you read the writings of someone on Stack Overflow, you immediately know if they are a skilled programmer or not." In February 2011, Stack Overflow launched Careers 2.0, an invitation-only job board where companies can find skilled programmers.

Stack Overflow demonstrates how a person's reputation score created in one community is starting to have value beyond the environments where it was built. By answering questions in an expert forum, you create more opportunities to find a better job." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)


New York-based banking startup Movenbank

Founder Damelin:

"Credit scores are a lagging indicator -- they only look at what has happened in the past," he says. "They [credit agencies] don't use data to look into whether your behaviour is risky or not now."

Rachel Botsman:

Movenbank's goal is not just to use technology to personalise the banking experience, but to reinvent the traditional risk model. King spent more than 18 years working for traditional banks and was struck by the opacity of much of the credit assessment process. "Most banks reject around 50 per cent of credit applications. It's a pretty strange business when you reject half of your potential customers and don't even tell them why."

At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED. This takes into account an individual's traditional credit score but also aspects such as their level of community involvement, social reputation and trust weighting. Do they have a good eBay rating? Do they send money peer-to-peer? It also measures their social connectivity -- how many friends do they have on Facebook? Who are they connected to on LinkedIn? Do they have an influential Klout score? It combines this data, not just to assess their risk, but to measure the potential value of the customer. If you refer other customers from your network or pay your bills on time, your CRED score will go up. "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.

A big question mark lies around people's readiness to open up their social data, but King believes consumers are willing to make a trade-off if they know how it is going to be used and what they will gain in return." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)


Applications

From: Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang

URL = http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html


"The process of filtering information to distill a smaller yet more refined set of usable, verified, trustworthy judgements is not easy. But it is doable. And it is both more feasible and more necessary now than ever before, due to information proliferation, technological advances, and pressing socio–economic problems. Indeed, we already see many types of reputation systems emerging, especially online:


  • Slashdot has grown to be a prime tech news site largely because of its inspired combination of open contribution and bottom–up filtering, using a modest amount of effort distributed over a large number of people — ranking the thousands of daily comments so one can choose to read just a few gems or all contributions. Similar communities are arising with different focuses, and figuring out why some fail while others succeed will teach us valuable design lessons.

URL = http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

  • Amazon, the online bookselling pioneer that has grown to be a juggernaut, early on made a decision to let users themselves rate each item, optionally accompanied by comments. Browsing through these ratings, suggestions, and warnings can be a gold mine of useful tips, one that is hard to replicate.
  • eBay uses reputations at the heart of its online auction system, for ranking buyer and seller honesty. Without this feedback, weeding out the bad apples who renege on deals would be far more difficult.

URL = http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/evaluating-feedback.html

  • Google uses derived reputations from Web page interlinking to decide which search results are most relevant, which proved so effective that it has rapidly grown to become a global information utility. It has no "community boundaries," but extends use of reputation to the Web in its entirety.
  • BizRate and ePinions provide ratings of businesses, seeking to identify those with better product quality and customer service. Both depend on feedback from many consumers, summarizing the experiences of many and in turn influencing future purchasing decisions of consumers in a virtuous feedback loop."

(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html)

Other examples:

- The Flickr interestingness algorithm at http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/

Dedicated Reputation Systems

Overview of online reputation management tools at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_manage_your_online_reputation.php

  1. iKarma
  2. Rapleaf
  3. Bazaar Voice
  4. Venyo
  5. The Gorb
  6. Opinity
  7. Co-workers

Reputation Systems specific to Second Life

  1. TrustNet
  2. BanLink


(Brand) Reputation Monitoring and Management Systems

  1. 10 Brand Reputation Monitoring Systems reviewed at

http://mashable.com/2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/


P2PRep

"P2PRep is a reputation-based protocol runs in a completely anonymous P2P networks. In P2PReP, local reputation management and community-wide reputation management are two different levels. Local reputation is defined as one single peer’s opinion of one other peer’s reputation, based on its formal experience. The community reputation means the aggregated general opinion given by multiple peers. P2PRep is generally combine these two factors together.

P2Prep works well in the environments of the percentage of malicious peers’ increasing and decreasing by changing well-behaved ones to rogues ones and changing rogue ones into well-behaved ones. As to the turn over case in peers’ population, P2PReP confirms its robust-ness showing a percentage of malicious downloads greater about 1% than scenario with no change." (http://whatifacomputerlies.blogspot.com/2007/04/reputation-system-in-p2p-network.html)

Discussion

See: Reputation - Discussion


Reputation Today, by Alison Hearn:

"Reputation is an extremely fluid, contingent, and precarious personal attribute generated entirely by the perception, attention and approval of others. As critic John Rodden argues, building a reputation involves an on-going process of ‘image-making’ and perception management, and, as such, is never given once and for all (Rodden, 2006: 75). Acquiring a reputation begs the question, ‘reputation for what?’ – the answer for which is predicated on a whole host of extremely variable contextual and institutional factors. While historically reputation has been assumed to be a direct reflection of the inherent quality of a person’s work or achievement, these days the acquisition of reputation bears very little relation to any specific skill or accomplishment, but appears to be derived solely from the performance of effective attention-getting itself, by any means necessary (Rodden, 2006: 80), including expressing feelings and opinions online.

Of course, any notion of the ‘inherent quality’ of a person’s achievement is an historical and cultural construction, as, indeed, is reputation itself. A ‘reputation’ is conditioned and, arguably, constituted by cultural and economic institutions that have the power to authorize and direct attention, and transmute that attention back into value. In other words, reputation is a cultural product, and, as such is conditioned by its mode of production. This mode of production is generally marked by the perennially exploitative relations between labour and capital as well as by other relations of power based on forms of identity such as race, sexuality and gender. In the end, what is produced in the form of a reputation inevitably exceeds the control of those individuals who generate it or the individual who must ‘carry’ it; typically, we are ‘subjected to’ a reputation. As women well know, having born the burden of what Linda Williams has called a ‘surplus aestheticism’ for centuries (1999: 41), visibility and the reputation that follows from it is, most often, a trap (Foucault, 1977).

Many have argued that this power of authorizing and validating attention, nowadays primarily enacted by the media industries, which can lead to the growth of a profitable reputation, feeds the lack in all individuals, promising, simultaneously, to recognize our uniqueness and assuage our anomie. As Leo Braudy has famously written, reputation and fame are, at least discursively, marked by contradiction - between uniqueness and acceptance, distinction and commonality, and, most of all, the desire for transparency between what one truly is ‘inside’ and what others see and celebrate (Braudy, 1997). Insofar as we collectively make and break reputations through the processes of engaging in, or withholding, identification with others, the rise of the attention or ‘reputation’ economy online can be read as a social symptom - evidence of a significant shift in modalities of the ‘self’ in the West."

(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/structuring-feeling-web-20-online-ranking-and-rating-and-digital-%E2%80%98reputation%E2%80%99-economy)

More Informaton

A thoughtful and recent analysis from 2025:

  • Status Games: Social Media and the Gamification of Value. By Samuel Vance-Law.

URL = https://thedrcenter.org/blog-status-games/?

Also:

  1. Insightfull commentary by Clay Shirky at

[4]

  1. See also our entries on Reputation - Portability and Reputation-based Governance
  2. Extensive Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation
  3. See also our entries on Trust and Identity
  4. Reputation in Open Source. Andrew Watson.
  5. Typology of Reputation Currencies at http://newcurrencyfrontiers.blogspot.com/2009/04/reputations.html

Key Books to Read

The Reputation Society, forthcoming book by by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang

URL = http://reputationsociety.com/

Retrieved from "https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Reputation&oldid=146380"