Reputation is ancient; the use of computerized record-keeping and digital communication networks, applied to this ancient social metric, is what makes an online reputation system useful. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has proposed that gossip, growing out of primate social grooming behavior, served as a way to reduce trust barriers and enable cooperative work among non-related individuals [link]. Systematically recorded trust accounting systems are at the core of the financial credit systems that enable billions of people to pay for goods and services with the swipe of a card – but such systems are heavily centralized. Centralized social accounting systems like consumer financial credit and decentralized systems like eBay's Feedback Forum [link] (decentralized in the sense that each individual buyer makes a judgement about a seller, instead of a central authority) are coordinated by computer network. Computer/communications networks, however, have even greater potential for enabling human social networks to automatically produce reputation and recommendation information by aggregating individual choices.
Useful Reputation System Links
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