Paper 3

Reputation Systems: Facilitating Trust in Internet Interactions

Problems

This publication is a paper that describes the role of reputation systems in fostering
trus over the Internet. It describes how such systems work, their advantages and
disadvantages

Strengths

(1) The paper maps how trust is built in the offline world in personal interactions
and then compares it to online reputation systems such as eBay's feedback and buyer/seller
rating system. It points out that while quality of the feedback is most important in
personal trust building, in an anonymous, large scale environment such as that of
the Internet, the quantity of feedback makes up for the apparent lack of quality.

(2)It argues that while reputations systems have no theoretical basis for success, they
work quite well in the online environment.

(3)It highlights some of the inherent drawbacks in such a system such as the lack of
portability of feedback information between different online systems (eg. between
Amazon and eBay) as well as limitation in the way the information is presented. The paper
argues that a lot of useful information is often not included in the results--information
that will help the user to make a better informed decision.

Weaknesses

(1) While the paper discusses the limitations and drawbacks of online reputation systems, it
does not offer solutions of how to improve them. 

(2) It does not compare the different reputation systems in detail. It merely mentions them.

(3) The paper is fairly limited in it's scope and could have been much better had it broadened
it's scope, performed some experiments to gather some data and used some kind of model to infer
any pattern in the information present.