Assignment 7 (hrs34)

One small scale community that I am a part of is my house. I live in college town with 6 others and we have a house to ourselves. In an effort to make close quarter livings as painless as possible, we have already instituted a sort of reputation system.

A reputation system, in the context that we will discus it, is a way of measuring one’s perceived trustworthiness and communal status by others. The example used by Resnick et al, was the rating system implemented by eBay (-1, 0, 1). The purpose of their system is to provide incentive to perform truthful and professional interactions. If a seller is dishonest or slow, they will receive a bad rating and will have a hard time selling in the future.

The reputation system used in our house is less of a rating system and more of an accountability system. We created a chore wheel with the 7 house members and 7 weekly chores. To further it as a reputation system, we could also create a chart so that when the chore is complete, you could check off that it was done. As is, a chore could be forgotten about in a given week and may go unnoticed. This is why trust is important in our community. We are all trusting that the others in the house will accomplish their task by the end of the week. Chores include things like taking out the garbage, and if this is not done we’ll have a stinky mess on our hands.

We trust that it will get done. We desire that it will get done early in the week, or whenever necessary. Rewards for doing so are present, but are currently intangible. By that, I mean that if someone does a good job with chores, they may get a high five, but there are no physical rewards such as an easier chore the next week.

As mentioned, creating a chart would further our reputation system because it contributes the three necessary elements described by Resnick:
• Long-lived entities that inspire an expectation of future interaction;
- a chart keeps permanent records.
• Capture and distribution of feedback about current interactions (such information must be visible in the future)
- easy to view when others have completed tasks
• Use of feedback to guide trust decisions.
-if a check is missing, trust is implicitly lowered.