Gossip and Reputation in Computational Systems

Gossip and reputation have been approached traditionally from the social sciences perspective. The main goal of this chapter is to provide a computational, system design perspective (from the Artificial Intelligence point of view) to reputation, gossip, and the relation between gossip and reputation. The simple exercise of building a computational model has been demonstrated to be highly beneficial from the social sciences perspective because it forces a level of detail and precision that reveals previously hidden problems and inconsistencies. Which computational models of gossip and reputation exist? How are they used in the context of computational environments? Which problems are they designed to solve? What is the interplay between computational gossip and reputation models? These are some of the questions the chapter will try to answer in the following sections