Distributed OS: Winter 2011 Reputation Systems Paper

What is reputation?

In the real world, people are generally quite conscious of certain behavioural actions that make. These actions are expected to fall within the social norms and are scrutinized continuously by the people around us. On a daily basis, Individuals build a personal set of judgment values and opinions on others in the society. When we listen to a politician on the news, or interact with a friends, we are updating this image that we have of the individual or group. It is this image we generate that helps us make conclusions as to whether we like the individual, whether we trust the individual, or whether we can relate to the individual. The global opinions that others have on us is known as reputation.

A reputation system's main purpose is to facilitate in providing a means for assumptions to be made about the level of trust one can have for a particular person or situation in executing a task to our liking. It is important to note the importance of the word assumption. With the gathered information, we are able to generate an estimate of their actions. It is by no means accurate. Furthermore, reputation is not a globally accepted view of an entity. In some cases, an individuals reputation can be quite varied between different observers. Some may have encountered contact with the entity in a different context or had a different level of expectation compared to others. Likewise, some individuals might be falsely persuaded to confirm to specific opinions by large and powerful groups, whereas others have a crystallized and hard-to-change opinion.

How can reputation be used?

Reputation can be useful in acquiring an understanding of how congruent one's own goals are from another. If we are to accomplish a desired task that requires the cooperation of others, we carefully analyze whether the individuals we choose will be a good fit or whether they will hinder our progress. Or, worse yet, halt our progress completely.