The Reputation Society

Forgive me, but as this is an 'outboard brain', I have to put in stuff that I know I'll eventually get round to, once I get that six-figure, three-year research grant...

So, two pieces on reputation and game theory. Meaning: I'll reciprocate with that guy/gal, if I believe that they'll reciprocate right back. (Game theory is one of those authentic 'play' sciences that I'm perpetually struggling to keep up on). First one from Edge.org, 'A Talk with Karl Sigmund', who wonders:

Reputation is something that is profoundly embedded in our mentality, and we — not just old professors, but everyone — care enormously about it. I have read that the moment when people really get desperate and start running amok is when they feel that they are considered completely worthless in their society. I should stress that we have been talking here essentially about human nature. The more or less official idea that human beings are selfish and rational — an idea that nobody except economists really took seriously, and now even economists say that they never did — this idea has now been totally discredited. There are many experiments that show that spontaneous impulses like the tendency for fairness or acts of sympathy or generosity play a huge role in human life.

The second piece, from First Monday, seems to require no maths, and is titled 'Manifesto for the Reputation Society'. Here's the abstract:

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

And just one tenuous connection with the play theory I know: Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilisation, reminding us that play and "dis-play" are both part of human nature - enjoying our ability to project a version of ourselves to others. Is Google and E-bay founding a social architecture on this?