News! Proposed the ESSA SIG Panel at http://www.essa.eu.org/simulation-wiki/ReputationSIGWikiPanelESSA08

Reputation and its transmission, i.e. gossip, is a type of social knowledge that plays a fundamental role in social order. Reputation increases cohesiveness of social groups and allows for distributed social control and sanction (plus a number of other functionalities, see Boehm, 1999). Reputation is a property that unwilling and unaware individuals derive from the generation, transmission and manipulation of social knowledge, namely social evaluations, and that contributes to regulate natural societies from the morning of mankind (Dunbar, 1998).

In the eighties, the positive role of reputation started to be perceived in the study of cooperation and of competitive interaction (markets), where it soon became an intangible asset for commerce. In economic transactions, reputation was found to impact positively on price levels and moreover on the products' quality. Later, it was extended to super-individual levels (corporate reputation and the Reputation Quotient, RQ, i.e. value assigned to firm reputation). Now, the role of reputation in establishing firm relationships and communication is unquestioned and use of this notion migrated to other fields:

• organisation science and management, where - to say it with the presentation words of the Reputation Institute site (www.reputation.com) - "success begins with reputation";
• governance and business ethics, especially in promoting corporate responsibility and community relations;
• ICT and the technology of interaction (see the e-commerce), where reputation has been applied to solving e-societal problems and governing e-institutions and organisations.

Despite its social impact, the technology of reputation is still improvised, not sufficiently based upon scientific knowledge. For example, online reputation reporting systems like eBay (but see also ElanceOnline? and Guru, Epinions, QLX, Amazon, etc.) are found to be under-exploited. Misperceiving the potential of reputation as preventive social knowledge, current treatment provides no sufficient theoretical account of, nor solid experimental evidence about, the generation, diffusion and use of reputational knowledge.

Simulation of reputation systems is becoming more and more strategically important in expanding communities (e.g., e-markets and e-networks), since growth depends on increasing the volume of affairs, enforcing the norms and promoting the users' confidence by reducing fraudulent behaviour. This SIG is created to act as a reference point for researchers interested in tackling the above problems with the tool of agent based simulation.

Membership of this SIG is free; planned activities are organisation of workshops, exchanging and comments on papers, working on joint proposals and projects. We plan to implement a SIG newsletter.

If you are interested in joining this SIG on Reputation please contact:

Mario Paolucci (mario.paolucci@istc.cnr.it) - LABSS-ISTC-CNR - (http://labss.istc.cnr.it) and eRep project (http://megatron.iiia.csic.es/eRep)