> of reputation is, if not hard-wired, pretty much universal. And the only > way it /can/ work is by assuming that he who can be trusted in small > things can be trusted in great. You tend to believe that someone who
This is a transparency issue. The customer (woman) assumes that she can infer the working of the mechanism and predict the future behaviour by collecting whatever is available at present. The better the mechanism is understood, the better prediction. This implies that true reputation can be based on rather sophisticated expertise about the object's inner logic and extensive data collection. This being almost impossible in practice, we resort to hype. All present reputation is generally based on well-managed hype. Due to this unfortunate built-in mechanism which makes us trust others' opinions, it is enough to initially fabricate mass approval to actually achieve one. So, for the long time to come, the only working true reputation will be based on customer knowing where the vendor lives and how his vendor's kids commute to school. ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions! http://auctions.yahoo.com
