Trust and privacy in distributed work groups

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and PredictionTrust plays an important role in both group cooperation and economic exchange. As new technologies emerge for communication and exchange, established mechanisms of trust are disrupted or distorted, which can lead to the breakdown of cooperation or to increasing fraud in exchange. This paper examines whether and how personal privacy information about members of distributed work groups influences individuals' cooperation and privacy behavior in the group. Specifically, we examine whether people use others' privacy settings as signals of trustworthiness that affect group cooperation. In addition, we examine how individual privacy preferences relate to trustworthy behavior. Understanding how people interact with others in online settings, in particular when they have limited information, has important implications for geographically distributed groups enabled through new information technologies. In addition, understanding how people might use information gleaned from technology usage, such as personal privacy settings, particularly in the absence of other information, has implications for understanding many potential situations that arise in pervasively networked environments.Preprin

The effect of discrete vs. continuous-valued ratings on reputation and ranking systems

When users rate objects, a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account ability or reputation may produce a fairer or more accurate aggregation of ratings than the straightforward arithmetic average. Recently a number of authors have proposed different co-determination algorithms where estimates of user and object reputation are refined iteratively together, permitting accurate measures of both to be derived directly from the rating data. However, simulations demonstrating these methods' efficacy assumed a continuum of rating values, consistent with typical physical modelling practice, whereas in most actual rating systems only a limited range of discrete values (such as a 5-star system) is employed. We perform a comparative test of several co-determination algorithms with different scales of discrete ratings and show that this seemingly minor modification in fact has a significant impact on algorithms' performance. Paradoxically, where rating resolution is low, increased noise in users' ratings may even improve the overall performance of the system.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Mesoscopic structure conditions the emergence of cooperation on social networks

We study the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on two social networks obtained from actual relational data. We find very different cooperation levels on each of them that can not be easily understood in terms of global statistical properties of both networks. We claim that the result can be understood at the mesoscopic scale, by studying the community structure of the networks. We explain the dependence of the cooperation level on the temptation parameter in terms of the internal structure of the communities and their interconnections. We then test our results on community-structured, specifically designed artificial networks, finding perfect agreement with the observations in the real networks. Our results support the conclusion that studies of evolutionary games on model networks and their interpretation in terms of global properties may not be sufficient to study specific, real social systems. In addition, the community perspective may be helpful to interpret the origin and behavior of existing networks as well as to design structures that show resilient cooperative behavior.Comment: Largely improved version, includes an artificial network model that fully confirms the explanation of the results in terms of inter- and intra-community structur

Understanding Video Game Developers as an Occupational Community

The video game industry has rapidly expanded over the last four decades; yet there is limited research about the workers who make video games. In examining these workers, this article responds to calls for renewed attention to the role of the occupation in understanding project-based workers in boundaryless careers. Specifically, this article uses secondary analysis of online sources to demonstrate that video game developers can be understood as a unique social group called an occupational community (OC). Once this classification has been made, the concept of OC can be used in future research to understand video game workers in terms of identity formation, competency development, career advancement and support, collective action, as well as adherence to and deviance from organizational and industry norms

The Digitization of Word-of-mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online Feedback Mechanisms

Online feedback mechanisms harness the bi-directional communication capabilities of the Internet in order to engineer large-scale word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are poised to have a much wider impact on organizations. Their growing popularity has potentially important implications for a wide range of management activities, such as brand building, customer acquisition and retention, product development, and quality assurance. This paper surveys our progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that these mechanisms represent. It discusses some important dimensions in which Internet-based feedback mechanisms differ from traditional word-of-mouth networks and surveys the most important issues related to their design, evaluation, and use. It provides an overview of relevant work in game theory and economics on the topic of reputation. It discusses how this body of work is being extended and combined with insights from computer science, management science, sociology, and psychology in order to take into consideration the special properties of online environments. Finally, it identifies opportunities that this new area presents for OR/MS resea

Knowledge dating and knowledge sharing in ad-hoc transient communities

This chapter will focus on the question of what rules and policies are conducive to the emergence of an adequate support infrastructure in the non-formal settings of a Learning Network. Once such an infrastructure is in place, a variety of ways again embedded in rules and policies may be used to guarantee its continued exis-tence. This was the subject of the previous chapter. Here the focus is on the phase of the emergence of social interaction and the formation of an incipient social in-frastructure. It is in this stage that the lone learner makes acquaintance with his or her online peers. More specifically, since learning through the exchange of knowl-edge is the ultimate objective of any Learning Network, we will present guidelines for effective and efficient knowledge dating in Learning Networks; ultimately, this should lead to knowledge sharing. During our discussion, we will introduce the notion of ad-hoc transient communities, temporal online gatherings of people fo-cused on a particular issue, which precisely because of their focus and transience help build a social infrastructure in a Learning Network. Ad-hoc transient com-munities may be seen as a knowledge dating and sharing service, offered in the context of a Learning Network

Gendered Discourse in the Political Behavior of Adolescents

The roots of adult civic and political participation originate in pre-adult experiences (Verba et al. 1995) and high school extracurricular activities offer students opportunities to develop interpersonal and leadership skills. In this research, we ask whether adolescents also learn gendered norms of political discourse through extracurricular activities. This project assessed gender differences in participation at the 1999 Model United Nations of the Southwest (MUNSW) at the University of Oklahoma. Important differences in participation were observed in the number and character of speaking turns taken by male and female delegates. We find that contextual factors, such as the sex of the committee chair, the issue areas addressed by the committee, and the timing of the session in the conference significantly influence who participates in the discourse, but the percentage of female participants surprisingly does not. The character of the political discourse suggests norms dominated by masculinity.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Adaptive Evolution of Cooperation through Darwinian Dynamics in Public Goods Games

The linear or threshold Public Goods game (PGG) is extensively accepted as a paradigmatic model to approach the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. Here we explore the significant effect of nonlinearity of the structures of public goods on the evolution of cooperation within the well-mixed population by adopting Darwinian dynamics, which simultaneously consider the evolution of populations and strategies on a continuous adaptive landscape, and extend the concept of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) as a coalition of strategies that is both convergent-stable and resistant to invasion. Results show (i) that in the linear PGG contributing nothing is an ESS, which contradicts experimental data, (ii) that in the threshold PGG contributing the threshold value is a fragile ESS, which cannot resist the invasion of contributing nothing, and (iii) that there exists a robust ESS of contributing more than half in the sigmoid PGG if the return rate is relatively high. This work reveals the significant effect of the nonlinearity of the structures of public goods on the evolution of cooperation, and suggests that, compared with the linear or threshold PGG, the sigmoid PGG might be a more proper model for the evolution of cooperation within the well-mixed population

Ethical Issues in Open Source Software

In this essay we argue that the current social and ethical structure in the Open Source Software (OSS) Community stem from its roots in academia. The individual developers experience a level of autonomy similar to that of a faculty member. Furthermore, we assert that the Open Source Software Community\u27s social structure demands benevolent leadership. We argue that it is difficult to pass off low quality open source software as high quality software and that the Open Source development model offers strong accountability. Finally, we argue that Open Source Software introduces ethical challenges for universities and the software development community

Individual strategy update and emergence of cooperation in social networks

In this paper, we critically study whether social networks can explain the emergence of cooperative behavior. We carry out an extensive simulation program in which we study the most representative social dilemmas. For the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it turns out that the emergence of cooperation is very dependent on the micro-dynamics. On the other hand, network clustering mostly facilitates global cooperation in the Stag Hunt game, whereas degree heterogeneity promotes cooperation in Snowdrift dilemmas. Thus, social networks do not promote cooperation in general, because the macrooutcome is not robust under change of dynamics. Therefore, having specific applications of interest in mind is crucial to include the appropriate microdetails in a good model.This work has been supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain) through grant MOSAICO, and by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) through grant MODELICO-CM.Publicad