An Alternative Perspective: the Reputing Agent

In this chapter, a social cognitive model of reputation is presented. As anticipated in the previous chapter, the notion of reputation will be defined as the output of a social process of transmission of information. The input to this process is the evaluation that agents directly form about a given agent during interaction or observation. This evaluation will be called here the social “image” of the agent. An agent’s reputation is argued to be distinct from, although strictly interrelated with, its image. More precisely, image will be defined as a set of evaluative beliefs about a given target, while reputation will be defined as the process and the effect of transmission of image, i.e., of specific social evaluations. As an application of this model, some simple predictions made possible by this conceptualisation will be presented. Furthermore, the decision to accept image will be compared with and distinguished from the decision to acknowledge reputation. In the next chapters, especially in Chapter 6, predictions about the specific effects of image and reputation in different social contexts, relevant for the design of computational systems of reputation, will be provided.