Building the Web Infrastructure for Providing Rating Services and Subscription to Them

We simulate the process of possible interactions between a set of competitive services, web infrastructure agents (portals) that provide online rating for these services, and users of these services. We argue that to have a profitable business, these portals are forced to have subscribed services that are rated by the portals. We follow the what-if methodology, analysing strategies that a service may choose from to select the best portal for it to subscribe to, and strategies for a portal to accept the subscription such that its reputation loss, in terms of the integrity of its ratings, is minimised. The results of our simulation are that under natural conditions, if most of the services and rating portals in a given industry do not accept a subscription policy similar to the one indicated above, they will lose, respectively, their ratings and reputations, and, moreover the rating portals will have problems in making a profit. Our prediction is that the modern portal-rating based economy sector will eventually evolve into a subscription process similar to the one we suggest in this study, as an alternative to a business model based purely on advertising