Reputation System Options

Multiple inputs may be used to compute the reputation:

● First are the explicit ratings used by consumers to rate suppliers from which they have received products and services.

● Second, explicit stakes can be posed by stakeholders with respect to the suppliers they back.

● Third, there could be indirect rating information based on payments by a consumer to suppliers. For example, multiple payments may imply that a consumer values a supplier highly (a repeat customer is a satisfied customer.)

● Finally, information about the reputation of known vendors could be extracted from online news sources and social media, which in turn would need to account for their reputation.

In the simplest case, there could be just one instance of a reputation system. However, in a distributed system with a low level of trust, multiple instances of the reputation service acting together may be able to more accurately calculate reputations. These instances will cross-check each other to reach consensus on reputations. Next, multiple reputation services may compute reputations for different segments of the community in order to provide load balancing or domain-specific reputations, which can be merged by an aggregating service. Multiple types of distributed computations may take place in the same network, so that different segments of the community have reputations computed by different groups of reputation services.