A framework for reputation bootstrapping based on reputation utility and game theories

Using reputation system to help determine trustworthiness of online entities is a widely adopted method in the current web environment. Reputation bootstrapping, known as determining a default reputation value for a newcomer, is an important issue which currently is short of a proper solution. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, marginal reputation utility, based on which we discuss the relationship between trust and reputation and construct a reputation bootstrapping framework that is universally applicable to different reputation models and systems. We use experiments to test the effectiveness of the proposed framework upon different reputation models, which shows satisfactory results