Re: Single model or framework for reputation/trust

Alan DeKok wrote:
> 
> Ed Gerck <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Reputation is usually understood as something from the past. It's
> > not about promises.
> 
>   Reputation (or past behavior) is a strong indicator of future
> behavior.  It shouldn't be ignored.

Of course not. But take a looks at banks: they never lend money
based on reputation as a strong indicator.

>   e.g. See any book on profiling criminals.  The books lay out exactly
> what the criminals are doing wrong, and describe how to use that
> information to catch them.  Yet despite having this information,
> criminals *can't* change their behavior, because of the exact problems
> that make them criminals.

The same doesn't happen with software.

> > In addition, you are, perhaps, familiar with the example given by
> > Bertrand Russel, where a farmer would go everyday and walk to a
> > chicken to give food to it. One day, the farmer walked in the same
> > way to the chicken and killed it. If reputation applies here, the
> > farmer should have had a good reputation with the chicken.
> 
>   Very cute, also carefully misleading.  It's trying to pretend that
> reputation is perfect, when it's not.  It's also pretending that
> positive reputation carries more information than negative reputation,
> when it doesn't.

No. What the example says is that reputation is NOT a strong
indicator of future behavior. In terms of trust, however, the 
chicken would know that the farmer could not be trusted because self-affirmations, even repeated many times, cannot induce trust. 
All that the chicken could see were the self-affirmations of the 
farmer.

Reputation is a component of trust (identified with the 
backward-looking chain of trust I mentioned here before)
but there are other mechanisms required to be able to induce
(and determine) trust.

Cheers,
Ed Gerck