Reputation, a universal currency for human social interactions

Abstract

Decision rules of reciprocity include ‘I help those who helped me’ (direct reciprocity) and ‘I help those who have helped others’ (indirect reciprocity), i.e. I help those who have a reputation to care for others. A person's reputation is a score that members of a social group update whenever they see the person interacting or hear at best multiple gossip about the person's social interactions. Reputation is the current standing the person has gained from previous investments or refusal of investments in helping others. Is he a good guy, can I trust him or should I better avoid him as a social partner? A good reputation pays off by attracting help from others, even from strangers or members from another group, if the recipient's reputation is known. Any costly investment in others, i.e. direct help, donations to charity, investment in averting climate change, etc. increases a person's reputation. I shall argue and illustrate with examples that a person's known reputation functions like money that can be used whenever the person needs help. Whenever possible I will present tests of predictions of evolutionary theory, i.e. fitness maximizing strategies, mostly by economic experiments with humans.

Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation

“…Reciprocity, the third potential cause of correlated pay-offs, is arguably the most contended possibility to generate cooperation and altruism [12,32]. It is the theme of this article and a focus of many contributions to this special issue of the Philosophical Transactions [7,[33][34][35][36][37].…”

“…The behavioural mechanism involved depends on public information obtained for instance by eavesdropping [176]. Cooperation based on indirect reciprocity has been shown to occur in humans [35,177]. Cooperation may be used as a signal, which can lead to competition among group members about 'showing off' by exerting altruistic help [178].…”

A computational framework for modelling inter-group behaviour using psychological theory

“…66 Additionally representation of activity in economic terms, through the potential costs and benefits of interaction are commonplace, particularly in game theoretic models that are cooperation based. 43 Reputation systems 67,68 are also a further way in which individual behaviours can be assessed, used as a measure of social standing. 69 These may operate in conjunction with social norms, that are the basis for judgements.…”

Boosting trust by facilitating communication: A model of trustee investments in information sharing

“…Both parties would benefit from fair exchange, but the exchange may not take place because the trustor has reason to mistrust the trustee (Akerlof, 1970;Coleman, 1990;Kollock, 1998). Fortunately, institutions that enable trustors to share information about trustees-as, for example, word-of-mouth networks or online reputation systems-allow actors to escape the dilemma (Buskens andRaub, 2002, 2013;Cook et al, 2009;Feinberg et al, 2014;Milinski, 2016;Resnick et al, 2000).…”