Enhancing Cooperative Behavior for Online Reputation Systems by Group Selection

Abstract

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 that has became to one of the key open issues. Research in the evolutionary game theory shows that the group selection or multilevel selection can favor the cooperation in the finite populations. Furthermore, Nowaket al., in [1], [2] give a fundamental condition for the evolution of cooperation by group selection. Based on the above important result, we extend the group selection concept in evolutionary biology and propose a group-based mechanism to enhance cooperation for online reputation systems.