Introduction to the Special Section on Reputation in Agent Societies

This special section includes papers from the 'Reputation in Agent Societies' workshop held as part of 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'04) and Web Intelligence (WI'04), September 20, 2004 in Beijing, China. The purpose of this workshop was to promote multidisciplinary collaboration for Reputation Systems modeling and implementation. Reputation is increasingly at the centre of attention in many fields of science and domains of application, including economics, organisations science, policy-making, (e-)governance, cultural evolution, social dilemmas, socio-dynamics, innofusion, etc. However, the result of all this attention is a great number of ad hoc models and little integration of instruments for the implementation, management and optimisation of reputation. On the one hand, entrepreneurs and administrators manage corporate and firm reputation without contributing to or accessing a solid, general and integrated body of scientific knowledge on the subject matter. On the other hand, software designers believe they can design and implement online reputation reporting systems without investigating what the properties, requirements and dynamics of reputation in natural societies are and why it evolved. We promoted the workshop and this special section with the hope of setting the first steps in the direction of a new, cross-disciplinary approach to reputation, accounting for the social cognitive mechanisms and processes that support it and working towards t a consensus on essential guidelines for designing or shaping reputation technologies.