Reputation Assessment Research Articles

Taxonomy of reputation assessment in peer-to-peer systems and analysis of their data retrieval

AbstractThe need for reputation assessment is particularly strong in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems because the peers’ personal site autonomy is amplified by the inherent technological decentralization of the environment. However, the decentralization notion makes the problem of designing a P2P-based reputation assessment substantially harder in P2P networks than in centralized settings. Existing reputation systems tackle the reputation assessment process in anad hocmanner. There is no systematic and coherent way to derive measures and analyze the current reputation systems. In this paper, we propose a reputation assessment process and use it to classify the existing reputation systems. Simulation experiments are conducted and focused on the different methods in selecting the recommendation sources and collecting the recommendations. These two phases can contribute significantly to the overall performance owing to precision, recall, and communication cost.

Resilience Aspects in the Sensor Web Infrastructure for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Risk Assessment Based on Earth Observation Data

This paper focuses on enabling resilience of the Sensor Web system for disaster monitoring and risk assessment that is based on the use of Earth Observation (EO) data. Resilience is the ability of the system to maintain trustworthy service delivery in spite of changes. Resilience of the EO infrastructure becomes an extremely important issue, especially in the disaster management domain. We propose to enable resilience through: 1) the use of grid resources and services to meet high performance computing requirements; and 2) assessment of resource reputation to select reliable resources. Grid services enable redundancy through integration of heterogeneous resources administrated by geographically distributed organizations. The same services could be provided by different organizations within the infrastructure, and could be of different levels of quality. Therefore, we propose to incorporate a utility-based reputation model to assess reliability of the resources. The proposed approach is implemented within the Namibia Sensor Web Pilot Project that was created as a testbed for evaluating and prototyping key technologies for rapid acquisition and distribution of data products for decision support systems to monitor floods.

Antecedents of parent-based school reputation and loyalty: an international application

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to validate the direction and strength of the relationships between school reputation, parental satisfaction and parental loyalty.Design/methodology/approach– The paper reports the findings of a survey of 806 parents from Schools in Abu Dhabi – the United Arab Emirates. The paper builds mainly on previous work of Skallerud (2011) on measurement of school reputations. Structural equation modelling was used to validate the reputation measure and to test the proposed relationships. The model hypothesised and tested relationships linking school reputation to parental satisfaction and loyalty.Findings– The results show strong support for a satisfaction-reputation-loyalty model and confirmed the four-dimensional scale (parental orientation, learning quality, safe environment and good teachers) for assessment of parent-based school reputation. Evidence was found that parents’ satisfaction significantly affects the four reputation dimensions. However, only three constructs of parent orientation affected parental perception of school loyalty. Additional personal or demographic variables should be included to improve the model.Research limitations/implications– The study was limited to parents of children attending public and private schools in Abu Dhabi. The model should be validated with other schools and in other Emirates and countries.Practical implications– Identifying the antecedents of parent-based school reputation might aid school decision makers to better address parental satisfaction and loyalty. A careful examination of the causal relations between the various constructs could aid in crafting and implementing effective programs for increasing parental satisfaction and attracting future students.Originality/value– The study adds to the limited body of research addressing the appropriate conceptualisation and measurement of school reputation. It also sheds light on a better understanding of the potential relationships among the constructs in the model.

The Impact of Stakeholder Power on Corporate Reputation: A Cross-Country Corporate Governance Perspective

Corporate reputation has roots in national beliefs about the role of the business corporation in society; these beliefs are constructed in accordance with the preferences of powerful stakeholders. Building on a stakeholder-power approach to corporate governance, we investigate whether differences in the legal rights and protections of shareholders, creditors, and workers across countries affect the general public’s reputation assessments of business corporations. Using a sample of 593 of the largest publicly traded companies in the world from 32 countries during 2007 to 2011, we find that in societies where shareholders enjoy a high degree of legal rights, the impact of stock market returns on corporate reputation becomes more positive. Likewise, the negative relationship between earnings volatility and reputation becomes greater when creditor rights are stronger. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence of an interaction effect between labor rights and corporate social performance on corporate reputation.

Constructive Representation of Trust: Single Rule Paradigm

A constructive computational framework for trust and reputation assessments is presented. It is proven free from any inconsistent or contradictory assessments under any scenarios of its application. A prototype implementation has been developed. The framework focuses on a single information-theoretical rule as inference mechanism, thus avoiding any biases or spurious constraints in the solutions. The users of our model will find its results intuitively plausible, free from clustering or drift to the extrema. The entire framework is suited for a direct use in economic, financial and intelligence analyses.

Performance and political skill in personal reputation assessments

PurposeReputation has many positive outcomes, but little is known about how individuals manage their personal reputation at work. This study aims to investigate the relationships between job performance and political skill on personal reputation.Design/methodology/approachNinety‐eight triads from a Midwestern manufacturer provided data. Employees rated their political skill, supervisors rated the employees' job performance, and coworkers rated the employees' personal reputation. The white‐collar respondents were mostly Caucasian, female, middle aged, and moderately tenured in their position. The data were analyzed with regression analysis.FindingsThe results illustrated positive political skill‐personal reputation and job performance ‐personal reputation relationships. Job performance was positively associated with personal reputation for politically skilled employees, but not for individuals low in political skill.Research limitations/implicationsJob performance was evaluated by employees' supervisors, but less subjective, quantitative measures of job performance would be helpful.Practical implicationsPolitical skill training and/or mentoring relationships may help individuals manage their personal reputation at work.Social implicationsThis study focused on personal reputation in a work environment. However, the results also may be useful to individuals in a variety of organizations (e.g. schools, clubs, churches).Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies to investigate how individuals manage their personal reputation in a work setting. Unlike previous research that used self‐evaluations of personal reputation, this study uses peer evaluations, which is more appropriate for the construct.

Trust Model Based on Reputation Propagation Mechanism in Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Contrary to the issues of cloud manufacturing environment such as vandalism and fraud, the paper proposes a trust model based on reputation propagation mechanism according to the dynamic nature of the reputation model, given the network reputation spread and establish the appropriate calculation model; "dyadic reciprocity" method used in the calculation model, in combination with beta distribution and Chebyshev inequality to realize the reputation assessment between two nodes.

Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (review)

Reviewed by: Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music Timothy B. Cochran Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music. Edited by Peter Kaminsky. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011. [342 p. ISBN 9781580463379. $80.] Music examples, charts, endnotes, index. Since Ravel's lifetime, writers have often associated the composer with masks, fabrication, and perfectionism. An engaging new volume of essays, Unmasking Ravel, addresses this heritage of master tropes from a number of complementary angles. As the title implies, the book casts a critical eye toward stereotypes prominent within Ravel reception. It interrogates notions of Ravel's imposture, superficiality, and classicism within their originating contexts, and proffers ways of appropriating them for current analysis. But the title has a second meaning. Not only do the authors of the collection examine the masks, but many look for what lies beneath them, using close readings of musical structure to elucidate the depth, coherence, and complexity of Ravel's compositional strategies. The book divides into three sections—"Orientations and Influences," "Analytical Case Studies," and "Interdisciplinary Perspectives"—but these categories are somewhat loose. All but the opening two chapters feature close readings of musical structure, and many of the most technical analyses rely on the critical discourse surrounding Ravel to construct their inter pretive lenses. The volume covers a representative sample of Ravel's piano, chamber, orchestral, and stage works, and utilizes a range of analytical paradigms—Schenkerian analysis being the most prominent—to create a wide variety of insights. Stephen Huebner opens the volume with a creatively intertextual essay on Ravel and the notion of classicism, which he treats as a network of antiromantic concepts linked closely with poets whom Ravel admired or [End Page 314] who were part of his artistic circle. Poe's emphasis on precision over impulse, Fargue's urban landscapes and found objects, Klingsor's imagination of geographical and temporal distance, and Régnier's nostalgia for an ideal past all resonate with Ravel's aesthetic predilections. Some of Huebner's connections between composer and poet are more specific than others. His reading of Ravel's affinity for Poe is especially thorough and convincing because it builds on the composer's public attributions of influence. Yet even looser comparisons of mutual interests and shared imagery situate Ravel's classicisms successfully within a poetic milieu. Barbara Kelly takes on the formation and contingency of Ravel's public image more directly than any other author in the volume. By examining interpretations of Ravel's style and personality in writings by his contemporaries and successors, Kelly demonstrates how current stereotypes of the composer were once in a state of evolution. She explores Roland-Manuel's role in linking Ravel's music with shifting aesthetic trends and politics of the pre- and post-World War I eras, and she notes how the consensus that emerged about the composer's identity around 1938 has had an enduring effect on his legacy. One emerges from this thorough assessment of Ravel's reputation and its construction with the impression that common notions of his artificiality, trickery, and privacy were originally strategic ways of shaping his image for the public more than essential characteristics. Thus, Kelly offers a potent reminder of the power of biography and criticism with implications beyond Ravel scholarship. If Kelly's essay sheds light on the discourse surrounding Ravel's identity, Michael Puri's exploration of Adorno's scattered writings on the composer turns a cross-section of that discourse toward productive analytical ends. As "the last true representative" of the French classical music tradition (p. 65), Adorno's Ravel has both mastered his heritage and lost faith in its continuation; he imbues his music with the fading memory of a culture passing away; he privileges musical surfaces without interiority, thus opposing traditional bourgeois values of originality, sincerity, and depth. Taking Adorno's interpretation of Ravel as a point of departure for an analysis of Valses nobles et sentimentales, Puri notes a heightened degree of reflexivity within the musical materials as the integrity of nineteenth-century waltz characters is challenged by moments of fragmentation, esotericism, and melancholy. Puri's essay is especially strong because he does not use the oddities of Valses to validate...

Reflections on my first year as Oral Pathology Section Editor: “the good, the less than ideal, and the downright ugly”

Reflections on my first year as Oral Pathology Section Editor: “the good, the less than ideal, and the downright ugly”

A multidimensional approach for detecting irony in Twitter

Irony is a pervasive aspect of many online texts, one made all the more difficult by the absence of face-to-face contact and vocal intonation. As our media increasingly become more social, the problem of irony detection will become even more pressing. We describe here a set of textual features for recognizing irony at a linguistic level, especially in short texts created via social media such as Twitter postings or "tweets". Our experiments concern four freely available data sets that were retrieved from Twitter using content words (e.g. "Toyota") and user-generated tags (e.g. "#irony"). We construct a new model of irony detection that is assessed along two dimensions: representativeness and relevance. Initial results are largely positive, and provide valuable insights into the figurative issues facing tasks such as sentiment analysis, assessment of online reputations, or decision making.

The Future is in your Reputation: The Effect of Reputation on the Diversification of PSFs

This paper provides an assessment of reputation as an antecedent of diversification in Professional Service Firms (PSFs). Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we argue that reputation is...

Service Characteristics and Firm Reputation: the Case of Telecom and Banking Industries

Using data from the Reputation Institute, the authors examined 175,847 individual assessments of firm reputation in the Telecom and Banking industries across 8 Latin American nations during 2006-20...

Revealing the commercialized and compliant Facebook user

PurposeFacebook users are both producers and consumers (i.e. “prosumers”), in the sense that they produce the disclosures that allow for Facebook's business success and they consume services. The purpose of this paper is to examine how best to characterize the commercialized and compliant members. The authors question the Facebook assertion that members knowingly and willingly approve of personal and commercial transparency and argue, instead, that complicity is engineered.Design/methodology/approachA survey of Facebook users was conducted between December 2010 and April 2011 at one private and four public universities. Respondents were questioned about: the level of their consumer activity on Facebook; their knowledge of Facebook advertiser data sharing practices and their attitude toward such; their use of sharing restrictions and the groups targeted; and their assessment of transparency benefits versus reputation and consumer risks.FindingsNo evidence was found to support the Facebook account of happy prosumers. Members reported that they avoided advertisements as much as possible and opposed data sharing/selling practices. However, many respondents were found to be relatively uneducated and passive prosumers, and those expressing a high concern for privacy were no exception.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the nonprobability sampling method, the results may lack generalizability.Practical implicationsTo avoid unwanted commercialization, users of social networking sites must become more aware of data mining and privacy protocols, demand more protections, or switch to more prosumer‐friendly platforms.Originality/valueThe paper reports empirical findings on Facebook members' prosumption patterns and attitudes.

The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be?I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value‐claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut.As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in “sharp practice”— an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short‐term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a “Reputation Index.” These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments.This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.

The Impact of Clique Membership on Children's Social Behavior and Status Nominations

AbstractThe impact of children's clique membership on their peer nominations for social behaviors and status was examined in a sample of 455 third‐ through fifth‐grade children. Social identity theory (SIT) and children's peer group affiliation and context served as primary conceptual frameworks for this investigation. As suggested by SIT, results indicated that children displayed favorable views toward their own cliquemates, nominating cliquemates more often for positive characteristics (e.g., prosocial, cool) and high status indicators (like‐most, most‐popular) than for negative characteristics (e.g., aggression) and low status indicators (like‐least, least‐popular). At the same time, children's views toward their cliquemates were commensurate with the clique's normative reputations as determined by the broader peer group (i.e., grade). This suggests that children's perceptions toward their cliquemates, albeit favorable, are also regulated by the overall clique context. Meaningful gender and grade effects on children's cliquemate nomination patterns were found. Findings also were discussed regarding the impact of clique size on a peer‐based assessment of social reputations and status.

Design on Reputation Mechanism for the Medical Consumables Suppliers Based on Fuzzy Clustering

Trust problem of medical consumables supply chain has been increasingly a focus of people’s attention. Business competition based on reputation management becomes the new strategy for business development in medical consumables supply chain. The reputation relationships among entities are dynamic. The medical consumables supply reputation management involves many different elements: the collaboration among entities, collection of the information to assess the reputation, and the standards for reputation assessment. The design factors are found for consideration of medical consumables supply reputation evaluation and the reputation mechanism is designed on the basis of fuzzy clustering.

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Amanda Carella, Corey J. Dahl, Adam Lownik, and Ted Weiers [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway's life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: Kalarson1@stthomas.edu.] Books Brasch, James D. That Other Hemingway: The Master Inventor. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2010. [On EH's life in Cuba. Brasch provides a context for his 1981 Hemingway's Library: A Composite Record, a catalogue of EH's immense library at the Finca Vigía (now available on line from the John F. Kennedy Library). Surveys those volumes devoted to poetry and art (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Lord Byron, Paul Cézanne and others) to reveal the breadth of Hemingway's intellectual curiosity and suggests that "knowledge, not experience, was the source of invention." Interviews with EH's personal physician and friend Dr. José Luis Herrera Sotolongo describe EH's activities during the Spanish Civil War and sympathy for the Cuban Revolution. Examines EH's correspondence with Malcom Cowley and Bernard Berenson, reconstructing his complicated relationship with each man and revealing the depths of his loneliness while living in Cuba. Concludes with logs of their correspondence and an inventory of books [End Page 129] by and about EH in Berenson's personal library. Relies on previously published material.] Bryfonski, Dedria, ed. Male and Female Roles in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Detroit: Greenhaven P, 2010. [Collection of reprinted excerpts ranging from 1952 through 2007 on gender issues by such well-known Hemingway scholars as Carlos Baker, Debra A. Moddelmog, Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes. Geared to young adult readers.] Earle, David M. All Man! Hemingway, 1950s Men's Magazines, and the Masculine Persona. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2009. [Introduction to 1950s pulp men's magazines focusing specifically on the popular image of EH in relation to the development of postwar hypermasculinity and misogyny. Earle's study "is not about Hemingway's fiction but Hemingway himself as a fiction, as a popular representation, and as an innately visual image that grows out of twentieth-century mass media and the dynamics of midcentury gender." Discusses EH's celebrity, both its rise and fall, beginning with the author's earliest pulp fragments housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. Loaded with visually stunning full color illustrations.] Eisler, Rudolf. Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New Delhi, India: Centrum Press, 2009. [Not seen.] Federspiel, Michael R. Picturing Hemingway's Michigan. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010. [Explores EH's early summers spent in the Little Traverse Bay area of Northern Michigan and the profound influence of the region on his later work. Provides an historical context, tracing the region's dramatic evolution from rural lumbering tract to vacation hotspot in the early 1900s. Combines over 250 black-and-white photographs, maps, illustrations, and postcards along with commentaries and excerpts from EH's stories, letters, and journals to create a picture of the people and places of Northern Michigan that serve as backdrop for so many of his writings.] Hasan, Rabiul. Rediscovering Hemingway in Bangladesh and India, 1971-2006. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2010. [Surveys the teaching, reception, and influence of EH's works in Bangladesh and India from 1971 to 2006, revealing the growing interest in EH studies in the Indian sub-continent. Opens with a brief overview of American and British criticism before moving into a survey of Indian and Bangladeshi criticism on EH's short stories and novels and the challenges specific to teaching American literature in Bangladesh and India. Closes with an assessment of EH's reputation and continued relevance among academics...

Analyzing Communities of Web Services Using Incentives

This paper proposes an effective mechanism dealing with reputation assessment of communities of web services (CWSs) known as societies composed of a number of functionally identical web services. The objective is to provide a general incentive for CWSs to act truthfully. The considered entities are designed as software autonomous agents equipped with advanced communication and reasoning capabilities. User agents request CWSs for services and accordingly rate their satisfactions about the received quality and community responsiveness. The strategies taken by different parties are private to individual agents, and the logging file that collects feedback is investigated by a controller agent. Furthermore, the accurate reputation assessment is achieved by maintaining a sound logging mechanism. To this end, the incentives for CWSs to act truthfully are investigated and analyzed, while the proposed framework defines the evaluation metrics involved in the reputation assessment of a community. In this paper, the proposed framework is described, a theoretical analysis of its assessment and its implementation along with discussion of empirical results are provided. Finally, the authors show how their model is efficient, particularly in very dynamic environments.

The Social Mission of Medical Education: Ranking the Schools

The basic purpose of medical schools is to educate physicians to care for the national population. Fulfilling this goal requires an adequate number of primary care physicians, adequate distribution of physicians to underserved areas, and a sufficient number of minority physicians in the workforce. To develop a metric called the social mission score to evaluate medical school output in these 3 dimensions. Secondary analysis of data from the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Masterfile and of data on race and ethnicity in medical schools from the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of American Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. U.S. medical schools. 60 043 physicians in active practice who graduated from medical school between 1999 and 2001. The percentage of graduates who practice primary care, work in health professional shortage areas, and are underrepresented minorities, combined into a composite social mission score. The contribution of medical schools to the social mission of medical education varied substantially. Three historically black colleges had the highest social mission rankings. Public and community-based medical schools had higher social mission scores than private and non-community-based schools. National Institutes of Health funding was inversely associated with social mission scores. Medical schools in the northeastern United States and in more urban areas were less likely to produce primary care physicians and physicians who practice in underserved areas. The AMA Physician Masterfile has limitations, including specialty self-designation by physicians, inconsistencies in reporting work addresses, and delays in information updates. The public good provided by medical schools may include contributions not reflected in the social mission score. The study was not designed to evaluate quality of care provided by medical school graduates. Medical schools vary substantially in their contribution to the social mission of medical education. School rankings based on the social mission score differ from those that use research funding and subjective assessments of school reputation. These findings suggest that initiatives at the medical school level could increase the proportion of physicians who practice primary care, work in underserved areas, and are underrepresented minorities.

Corporate Reputation: Do Board Characteristics Matter?

Our study draws on institutional and signalling theories to postulate relationships between board characteristics and corporate reputation. Based on a sample of 324 firms featured in Fortune's list of most admired corporations in the USA, our findings indicate that board characteristics significantly influence the assessment of firm reputation by the business community. Specifically, we found that firms with a greater proportion of outside directors and those with larger boards exhibited better reputation than those with smaller boards and a higher proportion of insiders. In addition, we observed an inverted‐U relationship between the average tenure of outside directors and corporate reputation. However, contrary to expectations, our findings indicate a negative association between independent leadership structure (i.e. absence of duality) and corporate reputation.