Apologies for multiple postings...

We are happy to announce:

-  RAS-2004  -

a workshop on

----- Reputation in Agent Societies ------

http://www.istc.cnr.it/labss/ras/

as part of 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on
Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'04) and Web Intelligence (WI'04)

September 20, 2004 - Beijing, China


The effect of Reputation in virtual and agent-mediated markets is
becoming more and more important. Online reputation reporting systems
are found to work poorly and inefficiently. Not surprisingly, as they
are practical, rather than theory-driven, tools. Therefore, thanks
especially to the impulse coming from the agents domain, reputation
finally rose up to the status of a well-defined scientific topic.

What is missing in the study of reputation is the merging of these
separate directions in an interdisciplinary integrated approach, which
accounts for the social cognitive mechanisms and processes. The focus on
an emergent scientific topic provides essential guidelines for designing
or shaping emergent technologies: reputation is both an emergent topic
of science and an emergent technology. This workshop aims to promove
high inter-disciplinary collaboration to get to the following advances:

-Integrated theory of reputation as an intelligent artefact
-Accounting for mechanisms, properties and social dynamics of reputation
-Allowing a theory-driven design of emergent technologies of reputation
for solving societal problems.


Workshop Rationale

The role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be
appreciated in the study of cooperation in the early eighties (Kreps and
Wilson, 1982). However, little understanding of its social and cognitive
underpinnings was achieved at that stage. Despite important advances in
the study of cooperation networks, no explicit theory of the cognitive
ingredients and processes which reputation is made of was provided.
Evolutionary game theorists did not model the decision to report on
reputation to others, misperceiving the potential of reputation as
preventive social knowledge. Even when this aspect of reputation is
addressed (Weesie and Raub, 1995), the selective mechanism of
transmission is not accounted for.

More recently, reputation and gossip started to become crucial in other
fields of the social sciences, for example organisation science and
management, governance, business ethics, etc. where the importance of
branding became visible. In these domains, reputation has soon become an
intangible asset for commerce. The economic reading of the issue at hand
implied an extension of reputation to super-individual levels, requiring
a still wanting conceptual clarification and interdisciplinary
investigation. The Reputation Institute (www.reputationinstitute.com)
shows that the reputation quotient (RQ) is pretty well correlated to the
economic value of firms: those with a good RQ reach a value
significantly higher than those with a low RQ. The follow-up question
then is what is the effect of reputation on firm performance. Are
operators informed about this impact of reputation? According to a
sustainable view of competition, far from obvious but in progress in the
current industrial firmament (cf. Srivastava and Crosby, 2000), the
concern about reputation is bound to increase with knowledge, and this
cannot fail to affect positively the firms' performance.

Presently, reputation is increasingly at the centre of attention in many
fields of science and domains of application, including but not reduced
to economics, organisations science, policy-making, (e-)governance,
cultural evolution, social dilemmas, socio-dynamics, innofusion, etc.
However, there is a great deal of ad hoc models, and little integration
of instruments for the implementation, management and optimisation of
reputation. On one hand, entrepreneurs and administrators deem it
possible to 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 and why it did evolve for.

In the view of the organisers of this workshop, reputation is an old
artefact for answering a new challenge, and that is the regulation of
complex, global, electronic societies. Innovation demands that the
potential of old instruments are fully understood and exploited, in
order to be incorporated into novel, intelligent technologies.

Topics

Submissions are expected from within different communities, especially
agent societies and technology, in particular multi-agent systems and
agent-based simulation, economics, organisation science and management,
e-governance/learning/business, virtual societies and markets social
cognition, economics, (evolutionary) game theory, cultural evolution,
social and collective dilemmas, social dynamics and cultural evolution,
business ethics. Topics include but are not limited to:

     * Corporate ad firm reputation
     * Reputation-based e-government, e-learning, e-business
     * Reputation for partner selection
     * Image and reputation
     * Reputation management and optimisation
     * Reputation and social networks
     * Reputation and norms
     * Reputation and altruism, reciprocity, and cooperation
     * Reputation and trust
     * Reputation and exchange
     * Reputation and institutions
     * Reputation and social capital

Timetable

     Submissions are due July 20
     Notification: August 7
     Acceptance notice: August, 15
     Registration: September, 1st

Submissions

Innovative and recent papers written in English are welcome for
submission. The papers will be reviewed by at least two programme
committee members. Selection criteria will focus on relevance,
originality with respect to the state of the art, and potential for
discussion.

The program committee invites submissions of contributions as: long
versions (up to 20 pages), short versions (up to 10 papges), and
position statements / posters (up to 2 pages). Submissions should be in
either POSTSCRIPT or PDF format and emailed to both Mario Paolucci
<[log in to unmask]> and Jordi Sabater <[log in to unmask]>.

Co-chairs

     Mario Paolucci, Jordi Sabater, Rosaria Conte, Carles Sierra

     LABSS - LABoratory of Agent Based Social Simulation
     ISTC - Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology
     CNR - National Research Council, Rome, Italy

     IIIA - Institut d'Investigacio en Intel.ligencia Artificial
     CSIC - Spanish Scientific Research Council
     Campus Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Program Committee

     * Conte, Rosaria
     * Dellarocas, Chris
     * Falcone, Rino
     * Panchanathan, Karthik
     * Paolucci, Mario
     * Rouchier, Juliette
     * Sabater, Jordi
     * Sierra, Carles
     * Troitzsch, Klaus
     * Yamagishi,Toshio (to be confirmed)
     * Carbo, Javier (to be confirmed)
     * Terano, Takao (to be confirmed)
     * Lopez y Lopez, Fabiola (to be confirmed)
     * Sonenberg, Litz (to be confirmed)
     * Antunes, Luis (to be confirmed)






-- 
Mario Paolucci
--
ThinkinGolem pscrl
Tel: +39 347 8146796
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.thinkingolem.com
--
Dottorato in Telematica e Società dell'Informazione
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni
Facoltà di Ingegneria
Università di Firenze
http://tsi.det.unifi.it/
--
Laboratory on Agent-Based Social Simulation
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione - CNR
http://www.istc.cnr.it/lss/
Viale Marx 15 - 00137 Roma (I)
Tel: +39 06 86090215
================================================================