Current Reputation Research Articles

Chicken or Egg: Exploring the Coevolution of VC Firm Reputation and Status

We explore the relationships between status and reputation, and between past and current status and reputation, and examine how these dynamics change over time and are influenced by participation in highly visible events. Using a sample of more than 500 newly-founded VC firms, we find that reputation and status positively influence each other, but that reputation has a greater effect on status, particularly when firms are younger. We also find that the effect of past status on current status weakens as VC firms age, but the relationship between past and current reputation remains consistent with age. Participating in blockbuster deals has a positive relationship with status when firms are young and a positive relationship with reputation when firms are older, and helps low status and low reputation firms more than it helps high status and high reputation firms. This study contributes to our understanding of how status and reputation develop and are differentiated, and provides insight into how new firms b...

“The eternal glory of Mr W., the United States, and the Method”: Sam Wanamaker, Stanislavskian

The opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in January 2014 cemented the connection between Wanamaker’s name and historically informed, reconstructionist approaches to staging Shakespeare and early modern drama. In the two decades since his death in 1993, Wanamaker has been routinely depicted in academic and journalistic accounts as The Man Who Built the Globe, the theater for which he campaigned tirelessly in the last third of his life. Stories about that life tend to begin and end with the Globe project. What is lost in these stories–and what this article seeks to remember and celebrate–is Wanamaker’s earlier career as a stage actor and director, in particular his reputation as the foremost exponent of the Method on the English stage in the 1950s, a decade that climaxed with his appearance at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959 as Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello. Drawing on previously unseen archive material, this account of Wanamaker’s preparatory work on Iago reveals a politically engaged and progressive naturalistic actor: one whose intellectual and emotional engagement with the major theorists of twentieth-century performance is at some odds with his current reputation as a preeminent advocate of “Original Practices.” Remembering Wanamaker’s earlier work as an actor and director serves as a salutary reminder that no approach to acting is inherently conservative or revolutionary, and that Stanislavsky’s work in particular has been, and can be again, mobilized to progressive political effect.

A neural network based reputation bootstrapping approach for service selection

With the concept of service-oriented computing becoming widely accepted in enterprise application integration, more and more computing resources are encapsulated as services and published online. Reputation mechanism has been studied to establish trust on prior unknown services. One of the limitations of current reputation mechanisms is that they cannot assess the reputation of newly deployed services as no record of their previous behaviours exists. Most of the current bootstrapping approaches merely assign default reputation values to newcomers. However, by this kind of methods, either newcomers or existing services will be favoured. In this paper, we present a novel reputation bootstrapping approach, where correlations between features and performance of existing services are learned through an artificial neural network (ANN) and they are then generalised to establish a tentative reputation when evaluating new and unknown services. Reputations of services published previously by the same provider are also incorporated for reputation bootstrapping if available. The proposed reputation bootstrapping approach is seamlessly embedded into an existing reputation model and implemented in the extended service-oriented architecture. Empirical studies of the proposed approach are shown at last.

Desire beyond the Château d'If

Desire beyond the Château d'If

Leveraging Social Networks to Combat Collusion in Reputation Systems for Peer-to-Peer Networks

In peer-to-peer networks (P2Ps), many autonomous peers without preexisting trust relationships share resources with each other. Due to their open environment, the P2Ps usually employ reputation systems to provide guidance in selecting trustworthy resource providers for high reliability and security; however, node collusion impairs the effectiveness of reputation systems in trustworthy node selection. Although some reputation systems have certain mechanisms to counter collusion, the effectiveness of the mechanisms is not sufficiently high. In this paper, we leverage social networks to enhance the capability of reputation systems in combating collusion. We first analyzed real trace of the reputation system in the Overstock online auction platform, which incorporates a social network. The analysis reveals the impact of the social network on user purchasing and reputation rating patterns. We, thus, identified suspicious collusion behavior patterns and propose a social network-based mechanism, SocialTrust, to counter collusion. SocialTrust adaptively adjusts the weight of ratings based on the social distance and interest relationship between peers. Experiment results show that SocialTrust can significantly strengthen the capability of current reputation systems in combating collusion.

The situation of agricultural education in the Hungarian language in Romania

Our objective was to analyse the situation of Hungarian language agricultural higher education in Romania. Our analyses have been focused mainly on Kovászna county. Following the evaluation of the characteristics of the county, we assessed the situation of Hungarian language higher education in Romania. History is considered important, because Hungarian language agricultural higher education goes back to the 1860s. The best solution for measuring the current reputation was the completion of questionnaires, which was done by 140 randomly selected people in Kovászna county. Following the evaluation and analysis of the questionnaires we found that local agricultural education, plant production and livestock farming are important activities for the locals. However, it is sure that even if they are satisfied with the education, they consider continuous development very important, since it would be a major help for the employment and subsistence of fresh graduates in Kovászna county.

The politics of truth reconsidered: C. Wright Mills as radical social theorist

Following introductory remarks on Mills’s academic persona and current reputation, I pursue two lines of investigation. First, I analyze the deep structure of his thought, constituted by a pragmatist epistemology and a radical sociology, or ‘politics of truth.’ Then I argue that this structure is undermined by inconsistencies between its two components.

The matching of lead underwriters and issuing firms in the Japanese corporate bond market

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of reputation in the matching of lead underwriters and issuing firms in the straight corporate bond market in Japan. While the existing literature already investigates how the issuing firm chooses its lead underwriter at the time of issue, this paper uses successive issues of straight corporate bonds to examine how the matching of lead underwriters and issuing firms changes over time.Data on individual issues of straight corporate bonds publicly issued in Japan between 25 February 1994 and 31 December 2009 are used to estimate models which explain how issuing firms match with lead underwriters. We measure the reputations of underwriters and issuing firms using each underwriter's percentile rank in the underwriting market and the issuer's percentile rank in the issuing proceeds, respectively. We construct a data set of straight corporate bond issues which includes many repeated issues. One of the contributions in this paper is to take account of these repeated issues by treating the data as a panel data set, and allowing for an issuer random effect in both probit and logit models of switching. This random effect is found to be significant.The estimation results show that issuing firms match with the same lead underwriter when the difference of the issuer's reputation and the current reputation of the previous lead underwriter is small. Issuing firms with an AAA rating at the time of issue are less likely to match with the same lead underwriters. In addition to reputation effects, there is strong evidence to suggest that issuing firms continue to stay matched with the same underwriter if the lead underwriter is a subsidiary of the issuing firm's main bank.

The Uprooted Would Never Have Been Written If Oscar Handlin Had Taken His Own, Latter-Day Advice

THE SHELF LIFE of historical scholarship seems almost as short as that of the perishables bought at the supermarket. That is why the career of The Uprooted, published nearly sixty years ago and republished yet again in the last decade, is remarkable. This book not only is still assigned in university courses, such as my own graduate and undergraduate seminars, and still evokes fresh reviews at amazon.com from inspired lay readers, but also is a work that historians continue to feel the need to address. From the moment of Rudolph Vecoli’s 1964 critical essay, and then throughout the decades of the prominence of the New Social History and of ethnic and whiteness studies, the conceptual framework and the main interpretive thrust of The Uprooted were subject to an especially lethal wrecking ball, and the book’s evasions, especially in the now crucial areas of race and gender, held up to strong, telling criticism. We all know what is wrong with the book, because Handlin’s poetic rendering of Thomas and Znaniecki’s modernization-organizational cycle formed the agenda of what several generations of immigration and ethnic historians wanted not to say. The book endures as one of the great works in American historical literature, no longer because anyone believes it to be correct in its views— although I do not believe that is as incorrect as its current reputation would have it—but instead because it is evocative, emotional, and contains enough that is plausible in feeling that we resist dismissing it completely. Perhaps more than anything else, it endures because readers correctly sense, as they do with so little academic history, the insistent personal, existential engagement of the author. Eventually, if they read carefully, they learn in the cryptic last pages of the 1973 edition that their suspicions are correct. There the author speaks of his desire to address the search for the meaning of his experience of his own immigrant father, who was apparently hospitalized and dying as the book was originally being conceived. Once having found Handlin in The Uprooted, readers may then rediscover other suggestive sections of the book,

Acceptance of Feedbacks in Reputation Systems: The Role of Online Social Interactions

In an online environment, the aim of reputation systems is to let parties rate each other and to help consumers in deciding whether to transact with a given party. In current reputation systems for e-commerce, users have to trust unreliable information sources and anonymous people. As a result, users are not only hesitant to trust online seller but also to reputation systems. Therefore, there is a need to improve current reputation systems by allowing users to make buying decision based on reliable source of information. This paper proposes a new approach of sharing knowledge and experience in reputation systems by utilizing social interactions. This study examines the potentials of integrating social relations information in reputation systems by proposing a model of acceptance of feedbacks in reputation systems.

Energy-saving reputation method for wireless sensor networks

Reputation mechanism has been recently introduced into wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to overcome the deficiencies incurred by cryptography alone. Unlike most current reputation mechanisms that are based on binomial distribution and to some extent, do not give due attention to the aspect of energy constraint of WSNs, this research deduces and proves the feasibility that negative binomial distribution can well be used in the reputation update with distinctive energy-saving features. Comparison tests with respect to the energy consumption in terms of reputation computing frequencies are done between the traditional reputation method and the one in this study. Results show that our method can save more energy for the reputation update and thus can better meet the power constraints of WSNs.

A brief history of the tourniquet

Abstract : The tourniquet is a device first used in antiquity; it has been praised or vilified throughout the ages, as it has been at times life-saving, and at other times limb-threatening.1 It interestingly has become a widely used tool in the current wars of Afghanistan and Iraq by most coalition medics, often with great success. Its current reputation is very positive among foot soldiers. Combat troops are reportedly going out on dangerous patrol missions with tourniquets already in place on extremities, as they wish to be fully ready to respond to extremity bleeding, if and when the mine or the improvised explosive device (IED) should go off. Some work has even been done on field uniforms, which have tourniquets actually sewn into sleeves, etc., in order to ensure the quickest access and application possible.2 Response times in this current conflict are so rapid and transportation by helicopter is so efficient that prolonged tourniquet times are rare. The data being collected would indicate that we are seeing few tourniquet-induced injuries because they are removed rapidly, and we are definitely saving lives because they are used liberally. The purpose of this report is to review the history of the tourniquet throughout the ages, as it has been modified and improved numerous times by a series of innovative physicians, up to the present day.

Accurate and Adaptive Reputation Mechanism for P2P File Sharing Network

P2P 文件共享网络的信任评价机制正面临着各种恶意攻击,例如聚集反馈、合谋欺骗和虚假交易,严重影响了整个系统的性能.为了保护P2P 文件共享网络,提出了一种高精度自适应声誉机制,简称AARep 机制(accurateand adaptive reputation mechanism).经过分析发现,在信任评价系统中,除了对交易的评价,相关的交易信息也起着重要的作用.其贡献在于:1) 通过以下手段,增加了信任值计算的精度:引入交易衰减函数,根据交易次序区分交易的重要程度;过滤掉具有低相似度的可疑节点;利用置信因子来反映观测值的可靠性;2) 为了使置信因子起效,提出了一种简单的交易验证协议.实验结果表明, AARep 能够显著消除或者减少各种攻击的威胁,提高系统性能.

Reputation-aware Service Selection based on QoS Similarity

For the up-and-coming computing models like as cloud computing, service is the standard package for meeting all kinds of consumers' requirements. Web Services are the concrete implement of the service. When users request and consume Web Services, services' reputations will play a vital role in users' selection. A gradually adjusting reputation evaluation method of Web Services is proposed based on eliminating the collusive behaviors of consumers step by step, and a reputation-aware model for service selection is designed. In order to adjust reputations, QoS similarity is computed firstly according to the differences between advertised QoS from service providers and delivered QoS from service consumers' evaluation, next, current reputation is attained; then the consumers are sorted based on reputation using clustering algorithm and the potential collusive consumers are mined using association rules algorithm; finally, the updated reputation is recalculated and saved in the reputation center included in the model. The experimental results show that the model can identify the malicious consumers and improve the exact rate of reputation evaluation and success rate of service selection.

RULE CONSEQUENTIALISM MAKES SENSE AFTER ALL

AbstractIt is commonly claimed that rule consequentialism (utilitarianism) collapses into act consequentialism, because sometimes there are benefits from breaking the rules. I suggest this argument is less powerful than has been believed. The argument requires a commitment to a very particular (usually implicit) account of feasibility and constraints. It requires the presupposition that thinking of rules as the relevant constraint is incorrect. Supposedly we should look at a smaller unit of choice—the single act—as the relevant choice variable. But once we see feasibility as a matter of degree, there is no obvious cut-off point for how broadly we should think about the constraints on our choices. Treating “a bundle of choices” as a relevant free variable is no less defensible than treating “a single act” as the relevant free variable. Rule utilitarianism, rule consequentialism, and other rules-based approaches are stronger than their current reputation.

The museum becomes archive: reassessing Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica

This article charts the history of MuseumAfrica (formerly the Africana Museum) from its founding vision to the present. Taking the museum’s current abysmal reputation as its starting point, it seeks to fill the void in academic and popular thought that encompasses the institution. Sketching the original mandate under which it was created before focusing on the museum’s work from 1935 to the near present, it explores the ways in which the museum interacted with and impacted the world outside its doors. Paying particular attention to the museum’s engagement with liberal and illiberal forces for change, it presents the museum as something other than the monument impervious to change that it is often assumed to be. Categorising the museum as an archive, this article argues in favour of the museum’s enduring relevance in the post‐colonial order.

Explanation-aware service selection: rationale and reputation

A collection of 1 billion1 publicly available web services can form an internet-scale infrastructure for building diverse applications. For a given application, selection of services and service providers from this collection becomes important and reputation is recognized as a key factor for this purpose. However, current reputation systems are limited in their ability to exchange reputation information between heterogeneous systems. To facilitate meaningful exchange and reuse of reputation information and for the overall determination of reputation, we identify the need to infer and explicate rationale for ratings. We present our knowledge-based approach to inferring and explicating rationale for ratings. We show that this approach facilitates detection of deception and collusion, user preference elicitation, explication of rationale behind user ratings and generation of personalized service recommendations.

Gabriel Harvey, James VI, and the Politics of Reading Early Modern Poetry

In this essay, Jennifer Richards suggests that a study of Gabriel Harvey's neglected poetry and prose qualifies his current reputation as a purely pragmatic Renaissance humanist. In his literary writings, Harvey explores the different ways in which social bonds are formed and sustained; this interest is also manifested in his marginalia. Richards considers the continuity between Harvey's work as both a writer and a reader in relation to his annotations of James VI's Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh, 1584). This example also suggests that the broader political implications of marginalia should be reappraised.

The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich

The Invisible Museum:Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich Gregory Maertz (bio) Forensic Art History The existence of a collection of 9,250 Nazi-era works of art, which was formed by the U.S. Army in 1946–47, has long been suspected by journalists and scholars of fascism and the Third Reich, including Brandon Taylor (1990), Frederic Spotts (2000), and David D'Arcy (2007).1 Mysterious as its origins are, elements of the "German War Art Collection" have been featured in museum exhibitions, discussed in the mass media, and reproduced in books.2 But aside from a few familiar, frequently exhibited objects, such as Hubert Lanzinger's Der Bannenträger (1937) [The Standard Bearer] [Figure 1], knowledge of the whereabouts, the full contents, and the provenance of this collection, the largest surviving remnant of Nazi culture, has eluded researchers for over sixty years. Legal, commercial, and scholarly interest in the restitution of Holocaust assets has mushroomed in the past decade. As a consequence, scholarship on U.S. handling of German cultural property has focused almost exclusively on restitution rather than on investigating the U.S. Army's official art looting campaign that targeted contemporary German art and functioned for two years in the American zone of occupation.3 Perhaps it is because the idea of sanctioned art theft conflicts with the heroic story of the U.S. Army's rescue and restitution of art treasures looted by the Nazis in occupied Europe that scholars have not observed how the same Army personnel that led the restitution effort—Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) officers—were also responsible for the confiscation of German art. They did so both [End Page 63] as a perpetrator—in forming the collection known as the NS-Reichsbesitz [National Socialist State Property]—and as a facilitator in the formation of the "German War Art Collection" by other Army personnel. Until now little work has been done on the confiscation and sequestration orders that resulted in a sanitized history of 20th-century art from which Nazi Modernist painting was excluded. Impounded and concealed from all but the most determined investigators, the contents of the U.S. Army's collection of Nazi art remained unexamined for 60 years. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hubert Lanzinger (1880-1950), “Der Bannenträger” [“The Standard Bearer”] (1937), “German War Art Collection” (oil on board, Gilkey number G.O.1.4244.47), Army Art Collection, as photographed by the author in the vault of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. A more interesting painting, in terms of iconography and execution, than is usually acknowledged, “The Standard Bearer” is nevertheless the most recognizable image produced during the Third Reich. While Lanzinger served as a war artist in Italy and on the Eastern Front, he had made his pre-war reputation as a society portraitist, much like Christian Schad, another artist whose current reputation is based on the works he produced in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit, but who also worked in a more conservative idiom. Of course, inspecting the Army's collection has been hindered by its complex disposition. Until recently the "German War Art Collection" was housed in three separate institutions—the U.S. Army's Center of Military History (450 objects), the Deutsches Historisches Museum [German Historical Museum] (1626 objects plus the 754 artifacts in the NS-Reichsbesitz), and the Bayerisches Armeemuseum [Bavarian Army Museum] (7,100).4 Complicating matters further are the access policies of the Nazi art repositories, which, even for well-credentialed researchers, range from the occasionally hospitable to the impossibly Kafkaesque. Attempts at divulging the contents of both collections [End Page 64] were also impeded by the disposition of related documents, few of which are housed in the expected and accessible confines of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration or the Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archives]. Some archives were sealed until fairly recently and others are stored in obscure locations without even the most basic facilities for conducting research. Still others, after their contents were studied and photographed, were moved to an unspecified location. Thus, illuminating the tangled provenance of the "German War...

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