Fairness Emergence through Simple Reputation

Trust Management is widely used to support users in making decisions in open, distributed systems. If two sellers on e-Bay have similar goods and service, similar marketing, they should also have similar income and reputation. Such an expectation can be formulated as a hypothesis: in realistic reputation (or trust management) systems, fairness should be an emergent property. The notion of fairness can be precisely defined and investigated based on the theory of equity. In this paper, we investigate the Fairness Emergence hypothesis in reputation systems and prove that in realistic circumstances, the hypothesis is valid. However, Fairness Emergence is not a universal phenomenon: in some circumstances it would be possible for one of two similar sellers to be better off. We study the sensitivity of Fairness Emergence to various aspects of a reputation systems.

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