The default setting was to strip out HTML in comments. I enabled it again, so now you can make links in your comments.
We decided to read about reputation for next week. Here are some papers I'm suggesting, both dealing with reputation.
Resnick, Paul and Richard Zeckhauser (2002). Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay's Reputation System. The Economics of the Internet and E-Commerce. Michael R. Baye, editor. Volume 11 of Advances in Applied Microeconomics. Amsterdam, Elsevier Science.
Toshio Yamagishi Improving the Lemons Market with a Reputation System: An Experimental Study of Internet Auctioning
Kollock, Peter. The production of trust in online markets. In Advances in Group Processes (Vol. 16), edited by E. J. Lawler, M. Macy, S. Thyne, and H. A. Walker. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. 1999.
Hess and Hagen, 2002, Informational Warfare
Some questions to think about: How can we compare online reputation systems, in which the information about the subject is attached to the subject, with gossip based reputation systems, in which the information about the subject passes through a social network, but is not part of the subject? Can we design a network/gossip based system for online communities that would overcome some of the ebay style system drawbacks? How can we model the difference between the implicit and explicit social sanctioning?
If you have a paper you'd like to recommend we read this week, please do so.
Here is a big selection of papers about reputation.
Some folks from Hampshire College have created this beautiful simulation environment called breve. It provides an interpreted, object-oriented language made for writing agent/swarm-based simulations, a physics model that can detect collisions, an OpenGL-driven 3D display of the agents, and mouse and keyboard interaction with the simulation as it's running.
Their demos provide some nice examples of things learning to walk, boids (warning: Java applet) flocking, and pretty graphical effects that you can achieve with their language (which seems to be called "steve").
breve is available for Mac OS X and Linux.
We had our first meeting today, and discussed a number of potential topics and readings.
Social simulation
Social simulation and the modelling of social interactions will be a big theme. We're going to start with a discussion of some of the fundamental questions: how to relate these simulations to empirical data? how to evaluate a verify the results of a simulation - what do we really learn from them?
The readings for next week will be:
Here are some of the other topics we are planning to read and discuss in the next few weeks - and please add other suggestion, either for topics or readings. (Readings listed here are very preliminary).
Reputation
Explicit and implicit reputation indicators; group and individual reputations. Today's explicit reputation mechanism (e.g. ebay's) are plagued with reliability problems stemming from fear of retaliation, etc. What other models would work in these environments? Is there a radically different approach? Can it be experimented with through simulation? Reputation and trust.
Toshio Yamagishi. Trust as a form of social intelligence.
Social networks
Mapping online social networks with data such as email records, AIM buddy lists, etc. is attractively easy. But how meaningful are these maps? What contextual information - about the individual nodes (e.g. role in the organization, personality, motivation, etc. ) or the links (e.g. temporal data, frequency and direction, etc.) - would make for more meaning depictions of the social structure?
Deception and fakes
Fashion, self-representation and the flow of information
Strang and Macy, 2001. "In Search of Excellence: Fads, Success Stories,
and Adaptive Emulation"
Are there fashions to be found in blogs? How to find, model them? What is a good model for fashion in a complexly multi-hierarchical world
Cognitive categories
Linton C. Freeman. Filling in the Blanks: A Theory of Cognitive Categories and the Structure of Social Affiliation.Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2, p. 118-127.
Structuralism and sociolinguistics
Saussure, Lacan
People in organizations
Cross, R. & Prusak, L (2002). The People That Make Organizations Stop --- Or Go. Harvard Business Review 80(6), pp. 104-112.
Levin, D., Cross, R., & Abrams, L. (2002). The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. AOM Proceedings (Denver Conference). Awarded Lawrence Erlbaum Best Paper Award for 2002 Academy of Management Meetings.
attended by Scott Golder, Ethan Perry, Andrew Fiore, Martin Wattenberg and Judith Donath