Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Among strangers, trust is understandably much more difficult to build

Source: P. Resnick, K. Kuwabara, R. Zeckhauser, and E. Friedman. Reputation systems. Commun. ACM, 43:45–48, December 2000.

Among strangers, trust is understandably much more difficult to build.
Strangers lack known past histories or the prospect of future interaction, and they are not subject to a network of informed individuals who would punish bad and reward good behavior. In some sense, a stranger’s good name is not at stake. Given these factors, the temptation to “hit and run” outweighs the incentive to cooperate, since the future casts no shadow.

As a solution to the ubiquitous problem of trust in new short-term relationships on the Internet, reputa- tion systems have immediate appeal; the participants themselves create a safe community. Unfortunately, these systems face complex challenges, many of which yield no easy solutions.

Reputation systems are the worst way of building trust on the Internet, except for all those other ways that have been tried from time-to-time.

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