A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities

Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. Social mechanisms complement hard security techniques (such as passwords and digital certiicates), which only guarantee that a party is authenticated and authorized, but do not ensure that it exercises its authorization in a way that is desirable to others. Social mechanisms are even more important when trusted third parties are not available. Our speciic approach to reputation management leads to a decentralized society in which agents help each other weed out undesirable players.