Preface to a conference on Trust

Lawrence Lessig on Trust.

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Small Worlds in Security Systems: an Analysis of the PGP Certificate Graph

Abstract: We propose a new approach to securing self-organized mobile ad hoc networks. In this approach, security is achieved in a fully self-organized manner; by this we mean that the
security system does not require any kind of certification authority or centralized server, even for the initialization phase. In our work, we were inspired by PGP [15] because its operation relies solely on the acquaintances between users. We show that the small-world phenomenon
naturally emerges in the PGP system as a consequence of the self-organization of users. We show this by studying the PGP certificate graph properties and by quantifying its small-world characteristics. We argue that the certificate graphs of self-organized security systems will exhibit a similar small-world phenomenon, and we provide a way to model self-organized certificate graphs. The results of the PGP certificate graph analysis and graph modelling can be used to build new self-organized security systems and to test the performance of the existing proposals. In this work, we refer to such an example.

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How To Search a Social Network

by Lada Adamic and Aytan Adar, HP Labs

This sounds like something that could inform search protocols in reputation networks.

Abstract: We address the question of how participants in a small world experiment are able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about their immediate contacts. We simulate such experiments on a network of actual email contacts within an organization. We show that strategies using information about a contact's position in physical space or in an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to locate most targets using the small world method but not necessarily where the network is incomplete. We compare our findings to recent theoretical hypothesis about underlying social structure that would enable these simple search strategies to succeed.

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Social Structure and Opinion Formation

by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs.

Abstract: We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in the long time limit. This coexistence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.

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You Don't Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software

Abstract: Social capital analysts have debated the implications of the Internet for some years now. But this debate has recently been joined from the opposite side, as software experts and developers are showing an increased desire to understand and improve social networks, both offline and online.This report introduces some of the core ideas of this new unified debate, and outlines possible directions for the future.

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Internet-Scale Namespaces

Article about namespaces. Also read Part II on names and trust.

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Publications of German Sakaryan

Some interesting papers on the macro aspects of P2P communities and its dynamics.

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RedNova News - Psychohistory is Coming,: ; Scientists Learning to Take Society's Temperature

Excerpt: "Among the newest of the enterprises - and closest to the spirit of Asimov's psychohistory - is a discipline called sociophysics. The name has been around for decades, but only in the 21st century has it become more science than slogan.

Like Asimov's psychohistory, sociophysics is rooted in statistical mechanics, the math used by physicists to describe the big picture when lacking data about the details. Nobody can track the trillion trillion molecules of air floating around in a room, for instance, but statistical mechanics can tell you how an air conditioner will affect the overall temperature.

In a similar way, science cannot describe how any given individual will behave. But put enough people together, Asimov's psychohistorian Hari Seldon reasoned, and laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns - just as the way molecules move and interact determines the temperature and pressure of a gas."

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Connectedness: What is social capital and how do we measure it?

References to papers about making theidea of "social capital" more concrete, and one paper on how to measure it.


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Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction, by Colin Camerer

Game theory, with feelings. This book claims to have lots of experiments to show where game theory succeeds and where it fails. Of interest are the areas mentioned in this paragraph of the abstract:

Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life.

Looks like a good resource.

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When is Reputation Bad

Ely, Fudenberg and Levine discusses a scenario where the presence of a reputation system may invoke bad behaviour in good players in order to maintain a good reputation. Framing their work within game theory, the authors describe a class of games where:

The key properties are that participation is optional for the short-run players, and that every action of the long-run player that makes the short-run players want to participate has a chance of being interpreted as a signal that the long-run player is "bad."

Paul Resnick has written a detailed review of the paper in his blog - also a recommended layman's read. There are interesting comments from readers along the lines of the age-old game theory vs. irrationality debate.

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