Online reputation

Reputation or image of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization) is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria. It is important in business, education, online communities, and many other fields.

Reputation may be considered as a component of identity as defined by others.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, , and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organisations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

Until very recently the cognitive nature of reputation was substantially ignored. This has caused a misunderstanding of the effective role of reputation in a number of real-life domains and related scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, the role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s.

Working toward such a definition, reputation as a socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns properties of agents, namely their attitudes toward some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance. Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to spread. Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts also for the transmissibility and therefore for the propagation of reputation.

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