Survey on social reputation mechanisms: Someone told me I can trust you

TL;DR

This survey explores various social reputation mechanisms across different scopes, analyzing how online trust is built through reputation systems that mirror real social phenomena.

Contribution

It maps social phenomena to existing reputation mechanisms across individual, acquaintances, and neighbourhood scopes, providing a comprehensive overview.

Findings

Reputation mechanisms vary across different social scopes.

Social reputation mechanisms reflect real-world social behaviors.

The paper categorizes mechanisms into three main scopes.

Abstract

Nowadays, most business and social interactions have moved to the internet, highlighting the relevance of creating online trust. One way to obtain a measure of trust is through reputation mechanisms, which record one's past performance and interactions to generate a reputational value. We observe that numerous existing reputation mechanisms share similarities with actual social phenomena; we call such mechanisms 'social reputation mechanisms'. The aim of this paper is to discuss several social phenomena and map these to existing social reputation mechanisms in a variety of scopes. First, we focus on reputation mechanisms in the individual scope, in which everyone is responsible for their own reputation. Subjective reputational values may be communicated to different entities in the form of recommendations. Secondly, we discuss social reputation mechanisms in the acquaintances scope, where one's reputation can be tied to another through vouching or invite-only networks. Finally, we present existing social reputation mechanisms in the neighbourhood scope. In such systems, one's reputation can heavily be affected by the behaviour of others in their neighbourhood or social group.