I argue that taking the Practical Conditionals Thesis (PCT) seriously demands a new understanding of the semantics of such conditionals. Practical Conditionals Thesis: A practical conditional [if A][ought(B)] expresses B’s conditional preferability given A Paul Weirich has argued that the conditional utility of a state of affairs B on A is to be identified as the degree to which it is desired u...

The development of complex applications that use the Peer-to-Peer computing model is restrained by security and trust management concerns, despite evident performance benefits. An example of such an application of P2P computing is P2P Massive Multi-user Online Games, where cheating by players is simple without centralized control or specialized trust management mechanisms. The article presents ...

Reputation mechanisms have become an important component of electronic markets, helping to build trust and elicit cooperation among loosely connected and geographically dispersed economic agents. Understanding the impact of different reputation mechanism design parameters on the resulting market efficiency has, thus, emerged as a question of theoretical and practical interest. Along these lines...

Evaluation of an information system’s success and user satisfaction are important issues in information systems research, especially for emerging online service systems on the Internet. The purpose of this study is to develop an evaluation model for question investigation from user’s perspective. We have established the theoretical foundation and conceptualization of the constructs for user sat...

Several models have been proposed in the past for representing both reliability and reputation. However, we remark that a crucial point in the practical use of these two measures is represented by the possibility of suitably combining them to support the agent’s decision. In the past, we proposed a reliability-reputation model, called RRAF, that allows the user to choose how much importance to ...

OF THE DISSERTATION The Knowledge of Others’ Perceptions (KOP) Model: Practical Accuracy Among the Well-Acquainted by Brittany Charlotte Solomon Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology Washington University in St. Louis, 2015 Professor Joshua Jackson, Chair Simine Vazire, Co-Chair It is possible that people, especially those who are well-acquainted, have information about others that goes beyond the...

Reputation systems provide a valuable method to measure the trustworthiness of sellers or the quality of products in an e-commerce environment. Due to their economic importance, reputation systems are subject to many attacks. A common problem are unfair ratings which are used to unfairly increase or decrease the reputation of an entity. Although being of high practical relevance, unfair rating ...

In this paper, we propose a novel super-agent-based framework for reputation management and community formation in decentralized systems. We describe this framework in the context of Web service selection where agents with more capabilities act as super-agents. These super-agents serve as reputation managers to maintain reputation information of services and share the information with other con...

Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This paper has also benefited from suggestions made Abstract Experimental research and survey studies have yielded conflicting findings about the conditions under which budget slack is likely to arise. This study begins to reconcile the contradictory evidence by examining the impact of two features of the organizational context in whic...

Online marketplaces have become ubiquitous as sites like eBay, Taobao, Uber and AirBnB are frequented by billions of users regularly. The success of these marketplaces is attributed not only to the ease in which buyers can find sellers, but also to the fact that they provide reputation and feedback systems that help facilitate trust. I begin by briefly describing the basic ideas of how reputati...