Nowadays, most business and social interactions have moved to the internet,
highlighting the relevance of creating online trust. One way to obtain a
measure of trust is through reputation mechanisms, which record one's past
performance and interactions to generate a reputational value. We observe that
numerous existing reputation mechanisms share similarities with actual social
phenomena; we call such mechanisms 'social reputation mechanisms'. The aim of
this paper is to discuss several social phenomena and map these to existing
social reputation mechanisms in a variety of scopes. First, we focus on
reputation mechanisms in the individual scope, in which everyone is responsible
for their own reputation. Subjective reputational values may be communicated to
different entities in the form of recommendations. Secondly, we discuss social
reputation mechanisms in the acquaintances scope, where one's reputation can be
tied to another through vouching or invite-only networks. Finally, we present
existing social reputation mechanisms in the neighbourhood scope. In such
systems, one's reputation can heavily be affected by the behaviour of others in
their neighbourhood or social group.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl