Problem 1: Reputation Involves Costs and Needs Rewards
The eBay reputation system proves that if buyers are uncertain about seller’s trustworthiness, they will reward better seller reputations by raising their offers. Another aspect we must consider is that if it is costly to maintain a reputation for high quality (at least in time and effort), then a good reputation needs to be rewarded by the cost of building one. Similarly a bad reputation or a decline in reputation should incur a loss that exceeds the benefit from opportunistic behavior [7].
Reputation systems motivate people in ways monetary economies do. Any community that is equipped with a reputation system can truly benefit of a raise in its value only if the associated business model is capable to redistribute part of the extra value to the most valuable members of the community and the system provider.
Problem2: Avoiding Transferability of Reputation
In some rating based reputation systems it is to most raters’ perceived advantage that everyone agree with the rater. This is how chain letters, Amway and Ponzi schemes work [12,13]. They establish a system in which customers are motivated to recruit other customers.
As an example: If a vendor offered to discount past purchases if enough future customers buy the same product, it would be hard to get honest ratings for that vendor. All the buyers, in order to foster new selling and get the discount would rate the vendor very high.
Problem3: Verifying Assertions and Preventing Shilling
Among the simpler attacks that a reputation system can suffer the simplest yet very spread and dangerous, is called shilling. This term is often used to refer to submitting fake bids in an auction, but it can be considered in a broader context of submitting fake or misleading ratings, often exploiting identity forgery.
In particular, a person might submit positive ratings for one of her friends (positive shilling) or negative ratings for her competition (negative shilling). Either of these ideas introduces more subtle attacks, such as negatively rating a friend or positively rating a competitor to trick others into believing that competitors are trying to cheat.
Problem 6: Bootstrapping The System
Reputation-based trust must have some method to bootstrap the system [18]. The process of building a profile for new users is an ongoing process throughout the entire lifetime of the system. To efficiently bootstrap a reputation system it is vital to leverage on the reasons that make people willing to use the application in which the reputation system is placed. The real reasons often differ from the declared ones, and need ways to be investigated.
Problem 7: The REAL Reasons of Participations (And Not Participation)
Several motivations lead people to contribute to virtual communities and several researchers have investigated the matter.
Peter Kollock, in his book “Communities in Cyberspace” [15] outlines three motivations that are interesting because do not rely on altruistic behavior of the contributor: anticipated reciprocity, increased recognition, and sense of efficacy.
“Anticipated Reciprocity
Active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants. A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return.
Increased Recognition
Recognition is important to online contributors such that, in general, it is a key ingredient for encouraging community participation and reputation development.
Sense of Efficacy
Individuals may contribute because the act results in a sense of efficacy, that is, a sense that they have had some positive impact on the group and, sometimes, on their own self-image as an efficacious person. “
Another motivation, implicit in the ones above, is Sense of Community.
People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to many people to receive direct responses to whether one’s contribution was helpful or not.
In contrast to participants many people who join virtual community spaces remains lurkers and do not contribute.
There are several reasons why people choose not to participate online: having nothing to say/share, getting what they needed without having to participate actively, thinking that they were being helpful by not posting, wanting to learn more about the community before diving in, not being able to use the software because of poor usability and not liking the dynamics that they observed within the group [15].
The work of Kollock, even if in one sense is very exhaustive on the other hand has the limitation of being mostly based on people opinions and studies based on surveys. Unfortunately often people donʼt say all the truth.
A more recent work, among others, which nicely explores the matter from a more practical point of view is “Six degrees of reputation: The use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems” by David Shay and Trevor John Pinch, 2006 [4].
In this work Shay and Pinch, using as an example the famous e-marketplace Amazon.com demonstrates in concrete that reasons of online participations are mostly bound to economical factor rather than people good will. Shay and Pinch choose Amazon since they sell predominantly books, that are a particular kind of goods for which reviews are particularly powerful because they help establish the meaning of the artifacts in question.
Moreover at Amazon reviewers are invoked as a legitimate authority even though the only thing required to be be a reviewer is participation.
Shay and Pinch found out that Amazon reviewers participate:
“A. To share their opinion with the community,
B. To build an identity as a reviewer,
C. To get a job as a professional book reviewer,
D. Empowerment of seeing their name and review on a Web site and take pride in their ability to ‘publish’,
E. To legitimately (or not) promote a certain item,
F. Slur the competition attack others via posting negative reviews,
G. Self Promotion: “Reviews” from friends, paid professionals, author,
H. Review plagiarism (to promote or support the sales of a specific item, agenda or opinion),
I. To increase credibility and to build their identity,
J. Socket Puppets: Posting the same review multiple times for the same item, under different reviewer names,
K. To simply for free advertisements or spamming,
I. Promotion of political agendas.”
So in many cases people contribute in the perspective of getting a direct or an indirect economical advantage. This not always turn out to be a security or a resource-reliability problem but often it does.
Also a special mention must be made regarding Enterprise 2.0.
As a matter of fact Enterprise 2.0 collaborative/cooperative systems are often thought to be WEB 2.0 systems, especially from the business-model point of view. This usually isn’t the case.
As an example in enterprise communities, differently from the WEB ones, sharing one’s knowledge with others can be considered a bad investment. In a working environment having a knowledge that others donʼt have makes an individual unique and therefore very valuable. Obviously the inverse applies too.
Moreover sharing can involve a significant amount of time from contributors, prolongating their working hours over the regular duties, usually without any additional gain. The end result is that Enterprise 2.0 cooperative systems can comport even losses for their contributors, legitimating thus reluctance to participation.
Social Currencies and Business Models in Online and Enterprise RCE Systems
In conclusion the key for a successful digital cooperative community is to motivate participants. In this respect economical factors (implicit or explicit) can be very relevant.
To solve the problem of providing incentives for cooperative communities we can leverage on the “economy of reputation”, driving thus our community from stagnation to innovation.
The RCE model is a research project that adopting ad-hoc algorithms and business strategies aims to solve the problems that reputation evaluation involves. This way reputation can be used as a digital currency to safely bond usersʼ reputations to a self efficient rewarding mechanism, propelling communities’ growth and standards of quality.
Enterprise 2.0 communities can benefit the most from the RCE model adoption. A rewarding mechanism tied to usersʼ reputation is a fair mean to counterbalance the disadvantages. Even more, an RCE system can be a very effective mean to empower employees making more visible the ones with an higher reputation.
Also reputation is a very effective metric for automatically, safely and precisely detecting through Social Network Analysis techniques those people with certain skills or with implicit leadership over the others.
This way the Enterprise 2.0 system turns from an enemy to a valuable alley in promoting one’s career and a more effective tool for the company.
In this article many details are omitted. The goal was to give a little glimpse about the opportunities that the adoption of a reputation-based model such as RCE can provide.
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