Abstract

Ratings for products and services are increasingly important on the Internet, as they allow users to harvest the wisdom of the community in making decisions. However, the difficulty with ratings is that little is known about the people providing them. Interpreting ratings well requires that the reputations of raters be factored into the scores computed for rated objects, even though these reputations are not explicitly available. Taking advantage of the insight that reputation can be computed implicitly from ratings, this paper addresses the reputation problem for raters and its application to evaluating rated objects. We develop a general method to automatically compute reputations for raters based on the ratings they and others give to objects, and incorporate these reputations to generate value-added information about rated objects. We evaluate our mechanisms by performing experiments on data from major rating sites, and show that they have the desired properties of a good reputation system. In the process, we analyze some key characteristics of different types of Internet ratings. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation into automatically computing raters ’ reputations and applying these reputations to better evaluate rated objects.

Citations

2569	The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Brin, Page - 1998
2221	Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment - Kleinberg - 1998
872	Grouplens An open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews - Resnick, Iacovou, et al. - 1994
480	Applying Collaborative Filtering to Usenet News - Konstan, Miller, et al. - 1997
229	G.: Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use - Hill, Stead, et al. - 1995
164	Phoaks: A system for sharing recommendations - Terveen, Hill, et al.
132	Immunizing online reputation reporting systems against unfair ratings and discriminatory behavior - Dellarocas - 2000
87	Collaborative reputation mechanisms for electronic marketplaces. Decision Support Systems - Zacharia, Moukas, et al. - 2000
2	Everybody's an Expert on Everything - Guernsey
1	Web Sites Begin to Self Organize - Hafner - 2001