Re: towards a theory of reputation
At 01:14 PM 11/21/95 -0800, Wei Dai wrote:
The first step toward a theory of reputation is defining what reputation is. [...] If these interactions are mainly economic in nature, then we can represent Alice's reputation of Bob by a graph with the horizontal axis labeled price and the vertical axis labeled expected utility.
Any attempt to discuss and analyze reputations using morally neutral language is bound to wind up as boring long winded meaningless complicated word salad. You will wind up in the same place as the behaviorists did, going in ever diminishing epistemological circles until you vanish into the whichness of why and the whyness of which. Some things, for example reputations, behavior, or the principle of mathematical induction, necessarily involve concepts that are philosophically problematical. Any attempt to discuss these things while avoiding philosophically problematic concepts invariably degenerates into total fog. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com
On Mon, 20 Nov 1995, James A. Donald wrote:
Any attempt to discuss and analyze reputations using morally neutral language is bound to wind up as boring long winded meaningless complicated word salad.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Can you give an example to how to discuss reputation (i.e., the concept of reputation, not a particular reputation) using morally non-neutral language? William J. Halverson wrote:
What is the differnece between 'reputation' and 'value'?
When we say the value of some object, we implicitely assume that the quality of the information we used to evaluate the object is good enough that we don't have to deal with uncertainty. When we speak of reputation however, we explicitely assume that we have less than perfect information and that uncertainties must be dealt with. We normally speak of value of objects and reputation of entities, because information about objects are usually easier to obtain than information about entities.
Why quantify it? If Bob's advertising/testimonials are successful, he may not even have a 'reputation' because only insiders know about him.
Quantification is an abstraction that sometimes allows one to think about a concept more clearly. You decide whether this is the case for reputation. I don't completely understand your second sentence. Only people who know that Bob exists has a reputation of him, so if only insiders know he exists, his reputation consists of the insiders' reputations of him. Wei Dai
This discussion puzzles me. I thought we were bombarded with reputational goods all the time: brand names, stocks (what is a purchase in the 2ndary market but a purchase of reputation most of the time?), degrees from famous universities. Anonymity compliates matters only if no systems of unique ID is used. Throw in digital signatures and we are back at brand names, aren't we? A. Michael Froomkin | +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) Associate Professor of Law | U. Miami School of Law | froomkin@law.miami.edu P.O. Box 248087 | http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA | It's warm here.
On Wed, 22 Nov 1995, Michael Froomkin wrote:
This discussion puzzles me. I thought we were bombarded with reputational goods all the time: brand names, stocks (what is a purchase in the 2ndary market but a purchase of reputation most of the time?), degrees from famous universities. Anonymity compliates matters only if no systems of unique ID is used. Throw in digital signatures and we are back at brand names, aren't we?
It's true that we deal routinely with reputations now. However there is very little formal analysis of reputation as a concept. Although our common sense knowledge of reputations seem to serve us fairly well(*), there is no guarantee that it will scale well to an anonymous market where both the number of participants and the importance of reputation are much higher. * However, the government apparently doesn't think so. Witness the FDA and the SEC. We need to have formal algorithms to deal with reputations, and we need to be able to show that they have desirable properties. This will reduce transaction costs and help bring anonymous markets into the mainstream. Perhaps more importantly, good reputation algorithms will make agorics computing possible. There is a very interesting proposal for a network routing system based on microcurrency and positive reputations (see http://www.webcom.com/agorics/dsr.html). However it does not say what algorithms will be used to handle reputations. If the system is actually implemented, its proper functioning will depend as much on the properties of the reputation algorithms used as on the correctness of its protocols. Wei Dai
participants (3)
-
James A. Donald -
Michael Froomkin -
Wei Dai