A reputation-based trust model for agent societies

Trust and security issues are prevalent in agent societies, where agents are autonomously owned and operated in a networked environment. Nowadays, trust and reputation management is a promising approach to manage them. However, many reputation models su.ered from a major drawback – there is no mechanism to discourage agents from lying information when making a recommendation. Although some works do take into account of this issue, they usually do not penalize an agent for making poor referrals. Worse, some systems actually judge an agents referral reputation based on its service reputation. In situations where this is unacceptable, we need to have a mechanism where agents are not only discouraged from making poor referrals, but are also penalized when doing so. Towards this, we propose a reputation-based trust model that considers an agents referral reputation as a separate entity within the broader sense of an agents reputation. Our objective is not to replace any existing reputation mechanisms, but rather to complement and extend them.

A reputation-based grid information service

In a large-scale wide-area system such as the Grid, trust is a prime concern. The current generation of grid information services lack the ability to determine how trustworthy a particular grid service provider or grid customer is likely to be. In this paper, we propose a grid information service with reputation management facility and its underlying algorithm for computing and managing reputation in service-oriented grid computing. Our reputation management service is based on the concept of dynamic trust and reputation adaptation based on community experiences. The working model and functionality offered by the proposed reputation management service is discussed.

Performing on boards: the link between governance and corporate reputation in nonprofit arts boards

This paper is built on the hypothesis that good governance and reputation are inextricably linked. It takes the governance of performing arts organizations in Queensland, Australia as a case study, and focuses on the role of the nonprofit arts board and its practices of governance and measures of effectiveness. Because of the financial constraints under which arts companies operate, their sustainability relies on audiences and on government or corporate support. The reputation of the company flows from the board's capacity to manage finances, stakeholders and mission. In-depth interviews with board chairs and general managers revealed that strong management systems and rigorous financial reporting are the drivers of good governance. Innovation in product development and artistic excellence are secondary in reputation to these measures. The paper proposes a model of good governance for arts boards.

Corporate social responsibility : corporate reputation, business performance and public liability

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may be viewed as a business strategy rather than a philanthropic concept. The increasing use of CSR as a corporate core strategy, in reaction to consumers‘ growing sentiments, can influence aggregate consumption and consumers‘ quality of life. As such, CSR would be of interest to the policy makers and may become subject to corporate governance and control mechanism. CSR is largely unregulated. Reliance on corporations‘ self-restraint and voluntary initiatives is inadequate to protect the society and avoid the disadvantages that may emerge from the potential deceptive practices in using a CSR strategy. This study investigates the evidence of economic benefits as incentives to corporations for using CSR. CSR is measured in terms of the firm‘s relationships with primary stakeholders. A model is constructed to identify the primary stakeholders and to estimate the association between CSR, corporate reputation and business performance. Policy implications of CSR are discussed.

Evolution of cooperation in reputation system by group-based scheme

Reputation systems are very useful in large online communities in which users may frequently have the opportunity to interact with users with whom they have no prior experience. Recently, how to enhance the cooperative behaviors in the reputation system has become to one of the key open issues. Emerging schemes focused on developing efficient reward and punishment mechanisms or capturing the social or economic properties of participants. However, whether this kind of method can work widely or not has been hard to prove until now. Research in evolutionary game theory shows that group selection (or multilevel selection) can favor the cooperative behavior in the finite population. Furthermore, some recent works give fundamental conditions for the evolution of cooperation by group selection. In the paper, we extend the original group selection theory and propose a group-based scheme to enhance cooperation for online reputation systems. Related concepts are defined to capture the social structure and ties among participants in reputation system, e.g., group, assortativity, etc. Also, we use a Fermi distribution function to reflect the bounded rationality of participants and the existence of stochastic factors in evolutionary process. Extended simulations show that our scheme can enhance cooperation and improve the average performance of participants (e.g. payoff) in reputation system.

International standing, international reputation and Australian foreign policy

This thesis provides a systematic study of the concepts of international standing and international reputation in four significant episodes in Australian foreign policy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. These concepts are shown to have influenced Australian diplomacy, both as objects of policy and as instruments of policy.

An efficient approach based on trust and reputation for secured selection of grid resources

Security is a principal concern in offering an infrastructure for the formation of general-purpose computational grids. A number of grid implementations have been devised to deal with the security concerns by authenticating the users, hosts and their interactions in an appropriate fashion. Resource management systems that are sophisticated and secured are inevitable for the efficient and beneficial deployment of grid computing services. The chief factors that can be problematic in the secured selection of grid resources are the wide range of selection and the high degree of strangeness. Moreover, the lack of a higher degree of confidence relationship is likely to prevent efficient resource allocation and utilisation. In this paper, we present an efficient approach for the secured selection of grid resources, so as to achieve secure execution of the jobs. This approach utilises trust and reputation for securely selecting the grid resources. To start with, the self-protection capability and reputation weightage of all the entities are computed, and based on those values, the trust factor (TF) of all the entities are determined. The reputation weightage of an entity is the measure of both the user’s feedback and other entities’ feedback. Those entities with higher TF values are selected for the secured execution of jobs. To make the proposed approach more comprehensive, a novel method is employed for evaluating the user’s feedback on the basis of the existing feedbacks available regarding the entities. This approach is proved to be scalable for an increased number of user jobs and grid entities. The experimentation portrays that this approach offers desirable efficiency in the secured selection of grid resources.