Reputation for complex societies

Reputation, the germ of gossip, is addressed in this chapter as a distributed instrument for social order. In literature, reputation is shown to promote (a) social control in cooperative contexts—like social groups and subgroups—and (b) partner selection in competitive ones, like (e-) markets and industrial districts. Current technology that affects, employs and extends reputation, applied to electronic markets or multi-agent systems, is discussed in light of its theoretical background. In order to compare reputation systems with their original analogue, a social cognitive model of reputation is presented. The application of the model to the theoretical study of norm-abiding behaviour and partner selection are discussed, as well as the refinement and improvement of current reputation technology. The chapter concludes with remarks and ideas for future research.</p

Deterrence and transmission as mechanisms ensuring reliability of gossip

Spreading information about the members of one\u27s group is one of the most universal human behaviors. Thanks to gossip, individuals can acquire the information about their peers without sustaining the burden of costly interactions with cheaters, but they can also create and revise social bonds. Gossip has also several positive functions at the group level, promoting cohesion and norm compliance. However, gossip can be unreliable, and can be used to damage others\u27 reputation or to circulate false information, thus becoming detrimental to people involved and useless for the group. In this work, we propose a the- oretical model in which reliability of gossip depends on the joint functioning of two distinct mechanisms. Thanks to the first, i.e., deterrence, individuals tend to avoid informational cheating because they fear punishment and the dis- ruption of social bonds. On the other hand, transmission provides humans with the opportunity of reducing the consequences of cheating through a manipulation of the source of gossip

Gossip for social control in natural and artificial societies

In this work we propose a theory of gossip as a means for social control. Exercising social control roughly means to isolate and to punish cheaters. However, punishment is costly and it inevitably implies the problem of second-order cooperation. Moving from a cognitive model of gossip, we report data from ethnographic studies and agent-based simulations to support our claim that gossip reduces the costs of social control without lowering its efficacy

Reputation for complex societies

Reputation, the germ of gossip, is addressed in this chapter as a distributed instrument for social order. In literature, reputation is shown to promote (a) social control in cooperative contexts—like social groups and subgroups—and (b) partner selection in competitive ones, like (e-) markets and industrial districts. Current technology that affects, employs and extends reputation, applied to electronic markets or multi-agent systems, is discussed in light of its theoretical background. In order to compare reputation systems with their original analogue, a social cognitive model of reputation is presented. The application of the model to the theoretical study of norm-abiding behaviour and partner selection are discussed, as well as the refinement and improvement of current reputation technology. The chapter concludes with remarks and ideas for future research