Reputation systems academic paper

The current issue of First Monday has a thorough academic article on reputation systems.

The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person’s mind of the reputation’s subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" — the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability — and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

Link (Thanks, Alex!) [Boing Boing]

Something to read. Reputation systems are very important for a lot of things, most especially ecommerce. But they seem to easily "gamed" to me.