EXPLORING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF SOFT SKILLS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS – A CONCEPTUAL EVALUATION APPROACH BASED ON CONSENSUS SCORING

Since the emergence of the Internet era in the early 1990s, many evaluation systems for the rating of various entities emerged. For example, at amazon.com people are able to rate books and transactions or to leave comments for other users. Although there is a wide variety of rating and evaluation mechanisms on the Internet, there are only few mechanisms for the evaluation of user skills in social networks. For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e. g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in social networks offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. Hence, in this paper, we provide a novel approach for the evaluation of soft skills on the Internet. Our approach is based on a consensus measurement approach in social network services based on social graphs as a formalization of personal relationships among users

Essays on reputation and information

The following thesis presents the results and analysis of three distinct experiments. The first features an experimental auction market designed to resemble eBay and other such peer-to-peer markets, including the presence of a reputation mechanism. The results presented suggest that the presence of a reputation mechanism will improve consumer welfare. Further, having a greater number of possible feedback ratings available leads to even further improvements in consumer welfare. The second features a repeated auction that also involves Bayesian uncertainty, about the `type’ of the seller. In addition, we present the predictions of a theoretical model that extends the existing sequential equilibrium literature into multi-player, market-based games. We find that reputational concerns remain an important consideration in such settings. The final experiment examines the role of within group heterogeneity (in the endowment and marginal return) in public goods games. The novel experimental designed allows for a full schema of relationships between the endowment and marginal return. The results presented suggest that there are significant behavioural differences depending on the relationship between the endowment and marginal return. When they are inverse, subject’s absolute contributions are not different. When the two are proportionally related, relative contributions are not different

Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2010 : Göttingen, 23. - 25. Februar 2010 ; Kurzfassungen der Beiträge

Dieser Band enthält Kurzfassungen der Beiträge zur MKWI 2010. Die Vollversionen der Beiträge sind auf dem wissenschaftlichen Publikationenserver (GoeScholar) der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen und über die Webseite des Universitätsverlags unter http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/univerlag/2010/mkwi/ online verfügbar und in die Literaturnachweissysteme eingebunden

Experimental Study of Market Reputation Mechanisms

We experimentally compare low-information, high-information and self-reporting reputation mechanisms. The results indicate players strategically reacted to the reputation mechanisms, with higher information mechanisms increasing market efficiency