We analyze the structure and processes of reputation building in a sample of Internet communities. Our approach uses a corpus of around 9,000 ‘active’ French websites and blogs which have been manually labeled as belonging to a specific topical territory, such as “cooking”, “crafts”, or “politics”. We propose a typology and map of the various structural positions that these websites may hold wi...

The absence of a router or a base station urges the need for better access control mechanism in the ad-hoc networks. This paper presents a localized approach for access control which implements ticket certification services through reputation mechanism. Reputation refers to, the opinion of one node as seen by other nodes. Ticket certification ensures that, only well behaving nodes (which forwar...

There is little if any research that explicitly models or tests the positive effects of temporary high interest rates as a signal of the resolve of a central banker to maintain or strengthen the value of the currency. Does an increase in interest rate defend the value of a currency? A (one-shot) sharp increase does. In this paper, we start with a game-theoretical model in which a monetary autho...

Background In early 2012, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) members in Ashanti Region were allowed to choose their own primary healthcare providers. This paper investigates the factors that enrolees in the Ashanti Region considered in choosing preferred primary healthcare providers (PPPs) and direction of association of such factors with the choice of PPP.   Methods Using a cross-sectiona...

The paper develops a theory of the separation between formal authority (the right to decide) and real authority (the effective control over decisions), and illustrates how a formally integrated structure can accommodate various degrees of "real" integration. Real authority is determined by the structure of information, which in turn depends on the allocation of formal authority. An increase in ...

background in early 2012, national health insurance scheme (nhis) members in ashanti region were allowed to choose their own primary healthcare providers. this paper investigates the factors that enrolees in the ashanti region considered in choosing preferred primary healthcare providers (ppps) and direction of association of such factors with the choice of ppp.   methods using a cross-sectiona...

In a decentralized system, entities, also known as peers, directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions towards their individual goals. In an open decentralized system, there is no single centralized authority that can regulate the entry of peers in the system. As a result, the system may contain malicious peers that try to disrupt the system and carry out attacks on oth...

With the rapid development of online reputation systems, manipulations against such systems are evolving quickly. In this paper, we propose a Dempster-Shafer theory based trust scheme to protect reputation systems. When tested against real user attack data collected from a cyber competition, the proposed scheme has achieved a very good performance in terms of accurately identifying malicious us...