A User-Centric Study Of Reputation Metrics in Online Communities

With the growing importance of online markets and communities, users increasingly have to interact with unknown people. When choosing their interaction partners, they often lack direct experience and are forced to rely on ratings provided by others who are often unknown themselves. A number of reputation systems have been developed with the aim of improving the credibility of inferred reputation values. Most of these reputation systems proved their accuracy and robustness against manipulation in evaluations and therefore are believed to enhance the users trust in the system. However, what also matters is the users’ experience with the reputation system. To investigate whether a reputation systems good functionality is sufficient to enhance the users’ rating behavior and the users’ trust in the provided reputation values and therefore also the entire system two substantially different reputation metrics were evaluated in an experimental game. The results obtained by this user-centric study are presented in this paper.