Reputation - Discussion
Discussion
Why Reputation is Important
John H. Clippinger on Identity, Reputation, and Social Currency
"Rating and reputation system are a natural and universal artifact of all forms of human cooperation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [1]:
"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.
Become super at something: Be a great host, runner, seller, renter, lender, in an online marketplace such as Airbnb, WhipCar or Zopa.
Build a portfolio: Make a note of references, ratings and reviews on various platforms that give a snapshot of your online value.
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?)