Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality

[Sunder]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Jim Choate wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Tim May wrote:
> 
> > For many years some of us have argued strongly for "reputation" as a 
> > core concept. Someone, perhaps even one of our own, even coined the 
> > phrase "reputation capital."
> 
> And for as many years many of us have seen that it's not as useful as it
> would first seem. The reality is that trust isn't transitive and as a
> result reputation isn't either.

Absolutely.  I may trust you, but I might not trust (or even know) your
best friend.
 
> > Reputation is an easily understandable concept which explains a lot 
> > about how imperfect protocols in the real world nevertheless "work." I 
> > won't go into what reputation is, even as defined by folks like us.
> 
> It may be 'easily understood', but it's also easily misunderstood (by
> many).

In what way?
 
> > But there are many aspects of reputation which lead to problems:
> 
> Reputation itself is a problem. Past behaviour (toward another) is not a
> reasonable predictor of future behavior (toward myself).

Yup, apparently there have been recent cases of high-rep sellers on ebay
who when ready to give up the ebay game put up auctions for high priced
items that they never deliver, effectively stealing the money.

It would be interesting to figure out an effective way to prevent
this.  Now ebay and things such as paypal, Visa/Master Card have measures
against this type of fraud, but they usually just eat the losses of the
bidder.

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