Signals convey information to marketplace participants regarding the unobservable quality of a product. Whenever product quality if unobservable prior to purchase, there is the risk of adverse selection. Problems of hidden information also occur in the consumer marketplace when the consumer is unable to verify the quality of a good prior to purchase. The sending, receiving, and interpretation or signals are potential ways to overcome the problem of adverse selection. In general, there is a lack of empirical evidence for signaling hypothesis, particularly that which links signaling to business performance outcomes. This research proposes that reputation serves as a marketplace signal to convey unobservable information about products offered for sale. Signaling hypotheses are tested in a network context, examining the influence of signals throughout a network of buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are many situations where a signal does not affect just one sender and one receiver; multiple constituencies may be aware of and react to a given signal. This study incorporates the actions of seller side principals, seller side agents, and buyer side agents when examining marketplace signals and provides a new perspective and better vantage point from which to test signaling theory. The research setting for this study is the world’s largest individual marketplace for Thoroughbred yearlings. Several sources of secondary data are employed. These openly available published sources of information were selected as representative of the information that would typically be available to marketplace principals and agents to use in planning interactions in this unique live auction marketplace. The findings from his study indicate that the reputation of seller side principals and agents affect the eventual business performance outcomes as measured by final price brought at auction for goods. Specifically, seller side principals and agents who have developed a reputation for producing or selling high-priced or high-performing goods will be rewarded in the marketplace with relatively higher prices for their goods. Buyer side agents who are more central in the marketplace will pay relatively higher prices for goods. Evidence suggests that more central seller side agents will receive relatively higher prices for their goods.

Nya banker etablerar sig kontinuerligt i Sverige. Det är därför av stort intresse för etablerade banker att ha nöjda och lojala kunder för att klara av marknadens hårda konkurrens. Uppsatsen riktar sig mot banksektorn och undersöker bankkundernas åsikter kring vad kundnöjdhet är och vad de efterfrågar från bankerna för att vara nöjda och lojala. Genom en fokusgrupp har denna studie undersökt hur lokala bankkunder upplever bankerna utifrån ett kundnöjdhets- och lojalitetsperspektiv. Fokusgruppen bestod av sju deltagare som fick svara på frågor i en diskussionsform. Data från fokusgruppen ställs mot vald teori och sammanställs i en analys. Resultatet av uppsatsarbetet visar att kundnöjdhet hos bankkunder inte är resultatet av hur väl företag lyckas överträffa kundens förväntningar. Istället skapas nöjdhet genom kundes erfarenheter, upplevelser och känslor till banken. För att nå högre kundnöjdhet behöver bankerna skapa ett positivt rykte. För kunderna är det viktigt att de har en relation med banken byggd på personlig kontakt. Relationen mellan bank och kund är svårtolkad men uppvisar tecken på att vara ömsesidig. Bankerna väljer att skära ner antalet kontor i landet och minska kontanthanteringen men lyssnar samtidigt på kunden och ersätter dessa tjänster med IT-lösningar. Utvecklingen mot internettjänster, färre kontor och mindre kontanthantering verkar inte ha påverkat kundernas upplevelse negativt vilket tyder på att det finns en form av blixtlåsrelation mellan kund och bank där båda anpassar sig efter varandras behov. Fokusgruppen lyfter fram att en stor del av lojaliteten till banken grundar sig i svårigheten att byta bank utan att mötas av höga transaktionskostnader. Det tyder på att relationen inte är fullt positiv och det finns en form av ofrivillig beteendelojalitet bland kunderna gentemot bankerna. En lojal kund är nödvändigtvis inte en nöjd kund och vice versa. Kunder har blivit passiva angående sin ekonomi och föredrar att lägga över ansvaret till banker. Vidare lägger bankkunder lägre vikt vid produkter och förmåner och bankernas förmånsprogram ser därför ut att ha liten betydelse för kunden. En övergång mot att bygga känslomässig lojalitet och skapa personliga relationer till kund ger bankerna högre grad av kundnöjdhet och fyller kundens behov för att förbli lojal samtidigt  som banken skapar en grund för att generera positiv Mun till mun (eng. Word of mouth). / Banks are opening new offices in Sweden and therefore there's an increased need of satisfied and loyal customers to survive in a highly competitive market. The paper targets the banking sector and examines customers’ opinions about what customer satisfaction is and what they demand from banks to be satisfied and stay loyal. Customer satisfaction of bank customers are not the result of how well the company manages to exceed customer expectations. Instead it is created based on how each customer perceives their entire experience and feelings towards the bank. To achieve high customer satisfaction the banks need to generate Word of mouth and a positive reputation. Customers want a personal relationship towards their banks based on personal contact. There is a form of involuntary behavior-based loyalty among bank customer. Customers get stuck in habits and routines which makes it even harder to switch bank when they are tied up in loans and in investments. Customers have become passive about their finances and rather push the responsibility over to the banks. A move towards building emotional loyalty and create personal relationships with customers would give banks greater customer satisfaction and fulfill their customers’ needs to remain loyal.

Reputation has been the subject of marketing research throughout recent years, and it was found to be an important measure of how organizations are perceived. The theory of co-creation, where organizations interact and deliver value through the involvement of customers, has also shown positive effects on performance. The main purpose of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of how reputation and co-creation are managed internally. Furthermore, this study aims to investigate the impact of brand image, satisfaction, perceived quality, and brand experience on co-creation and reputation by evaluating the external perceptions of members of a nonprofit membership organization, the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce of Washington, D.C., Inc. (SACC-DC). For a nonprofit membership organization, both reputation and co-creation can be of importance, as they do not compete by financial means, but instead by how the members perceive the networking service that they provide. We could identify a research gap, since there is no study that examines co-creation in relation to reputation. Furthermore, there is a need to conduct more research on co-creation in the nonprofit context. We could also see that more in-depth studies need to be done on reputation in order to understand the underlying factors of the internal management of the reputation. In order to fulfill the purpose of the thesis, a mixed-method study has been conducted. In the qualitative study, we have conducted eight semi-structured interviews with board members and employees of SACC-DC. Through the interviews, we gained a deeper understanding of how the reputation is managed by exploring how the organization works with co-creation, identity, desired identity and perceived quality. From the interviews, four themes were derived to explain how the organization co-creates their reputation together with their members. The themes were brand identity, brand delivery, value, and mutual responsibility. Our qualitative findings resulted in a table, showing that the reputation could benefit from being co-created in nonprofit membership organizations. In order to advance an understanding of how members of SACC-DC perceive the reputation and co-creation, a quantitative study was conducted. We assessed the effects of brand image, brand experience, satisfaction and perceived quality on co-creation and reputation. Our regression analyses showed that brand image and brand experience had positive significant effects on both co-creation and reputation, and that perceived quality had a positive significant effect on reputation. We could also conclude that co-creation had a positive significant effect on reputation. From our qualitative interviews together with the results of our quantitative study, we could conclude that there are perceptional differences regarding the reputation between board members and members of SACC-DC. We can also conclude that the reputation of SACC-DC is indeed co-created by board members together with other members, which implies that both management and customers take part in the process of creating the best possible reputation. In addition to our theoretical contributions, we also made practical recommendations for both managers of nonprofit organizations in general and for SACC-DC in particular, on how to enhance the co-creation process of the reputation.

HBO's The Wire examines the relationship between institutions and individuals in American society and concludes that institutions restrict the agency of individuals, and series creator David Simon likens the power of institutions to the gods of Greek tragedy. In this project, I argue that shame culture enables institutions to have the social influence described by Simon. The paper's introduction defines the term "shame culture" and distinguishes it from "guilt culture," and I use medieval examples of shame culture to illustrate how shame functions in The Wire. This paper divides its detailed discussion of The Wire into four sections, each of which focuses on a different institution. The essay's first section explores how drug dealers and criminals use their reputations aggressively to build drug empires or simply survive, as the characters Marlo Stanfield, a drug kingpin, and Omar Little, a stickup artist, demonstrate. The second section examines Marlo and Omar's influence on young drug dealers, called corner kids in the series, and I argue that the public schools cannot prevent shame from being ingrained in these children. The third section focuses on police officers and, specifically, eventual police commissioner Cedric Daniels, and I examine how the police department's preoccupation with crime statistics reveals their dependence on shame and reputation—the police force is ineffective since they mirror in many ways the criminals they are trying to arrest. Lastly, the essay's fourth section analyzes politicians in The Wire and how Mayor Carcetti is powerless to respond to and exacerbates the city's social problems due to his need to preserve his public image. The paper concludes that social reform that grants agency to individuals in The Wire is impossible as long as shame culture shapes the various institutions depicted in the series.

This dissertation examines reputation as a regulating force in online and offline relationships and transactions, arguing that reputation requires protection through the promulgation of new laws. Using John Locke’s “under-labourer” approach as its central method, this dissertation ultimately sets out a series of conclusions, which form a preliminary framework upon which appropriate reputation regulation might be built. Part I of this dissertation studies offers an interdisciplinary study of reputation. Chapter 1 examines the ways that reputation is created and maintained, the purposes for which it is used, and its role in risk management and trust. These understandings are then applied to reputation in process. Chapter 2 explores formal reputation systems and the ways in which user investments and desires become written into reputation such that multiple levels of “dominant” norms may be simultaneously operant. Chapter 3 shows this normative force also operating on social network sites, shaping identity performances. Finally, having established these intersections and the regulating power of norms upon reputation, the effect of such performances is examined in chapter 4, which identifies reputation’s gatekeeper role in offline and online spaces and the risks this can create when information is accessed or employed without an understanding of the norms which have shaped that information. Thus reputation is shown as a socially negotiated and co-created process which exerts an unseen hegemonic force, with dominant political, economic and ideological interests embedded in seemingly social norms. These norms are enforced via reputation, which takes on a gatekeeper role, regulating access to a variety of spaces, information, and economic opportunities. Part II begins with an examination of the current forms of legal and quasi-legal regulation of reputation that exist, ultimately finding that none of them is fully applicable to the complexity of reputation. Having established this complexity and shown that current approaches are inadequate, chapter 6 moves on to examine and then reject the neoliberal approach currently applied to these issues, finding its focus on individual responsibility to be inadequate and inappropriate, calling instead for a mode of regulation that understands reputation within its social context.

Title: Do we have a common interest? - Cultivating relationships or spreading information; a study of Strategic Political Communication on Facebook. Authors: Amanda Gibbs Sjödin & Sean Rembe Mc Hugh Course: Medie- och Kommunikationsvetenskap C, Bachelor Thesis Paper, 15hp, HT 2014. Words: 16 027 This essay aims to examine the level of relationship cultivation strategies in Swedish campaign communication. The progress in political communication emphasizes aspects of public relations such as relationship marketing . We will combine theories regarding relationship marketing with the new possibilities created for campaign communication by the emergence of web 2.0. The popular social media platforms which exist within web 2.0 give campaigns well suited means to easily facilitate input, inspire dialogue and cultivate relationships. We aim to answer the following question; Which strategic components do the parties apply in their Facebook communication? Do the parties differ in their use of communicative tools? In order to answer this question we have operationalized theories in political communication, reputation management and relationship marketing. This operationalizing resulted in eight variables. We conducted a quantitative content analysis by measuring the presence of our variables in each Facebook post made by each party on their Facebook page during the final month of the 2014 election.. The results show that both parties utilize these strategies and in a similar way but that there is a difference in how much. The Feminist Initiative had a higher overall usage but the strategy common interest was used to a high level by both parties, this shows that the parties mainly stress shared values and ideology in their communication.

Distortions that affect macroeconomic outcomes are an important avenue through which we can explain differences in cross country output and productivity. In this thesis I concentrate on two types of distortions, political economy and informational distortions. In Chapter one, I build a model of intermediated corruption where interactions between government bureaucrats and those who bribe them are mediated by a third party. I show that intermediation has significant effects on the incidence of corruption and the prices entrepreneurs pay for permits. When corruption is particularly acute, measures that increase the frequency with which government bureaucrats are audited often have the undesirable result of increasing the prevalence of corruption because of intermediation. In Chapter two I explore the link between corruption and inequality by building a model in which tax collectors are corrupt. I find that as inequality increases, the frequency of corrupt transactions increases as well. I also find that where corruption is more severe, because wealthier individuals tend to pay lower taxes, inequality is higher. I perform a few quantitative experiments to better understand this linkage. Chapter three explores distortions that are caused by adverse selection in markets with search frictions. I find that when participants are concerned about the information they reveal through their interactions in the market, the distortions to liquidity are deeper and that equilibrium selection is significantly affected. I also find that markets with reputational concerns are more sensitive to outside shocks.

Distortions that affect macroeconomic outcomes are an important avenue through which we can explain differences in cross country output and productivity. In this thesis I concentrate on two types of distortions, political economy and informational distortions. In Chapter one, I build a model of intermediated corruption where interactions between government bureaucrats and those who bribe them are mediated by a third party. I show that intermediation has significant effects on the incidence of corruption and the prices entrepreneurs pay for permits. When corruption is particularly acute, measures that increase the frequency with which government bureaucrats are audited often have the undesirable result of increasing the prevalence of corruption because of intermediation. In Chapter two I explore the link between corruption and inequality by building a model in which tax collectors are corrupt. I find that as inequality increases, the frequency of corrupt transactions increases as well. I also find that where corruption is more severe, because wealthier individuals tend to pay lower taxes, inequality is higher. I perform a few quantitative experiments to better understand this linkage. Chapter three explores distortions that are caused by adverse selection in markets with search frictions. I find that when participants are concerned about the information they reveal through their interactions in the market, the distortions to liquidity are deeper and that equilibrium selection is significantly affected. I also find that markets with reputational concerns are more sensitive to outside shocks.

In the field of multiagent systems, trust and reputation systems are intended to assist agents in finding trustworthy partners with whom to interact. Earlier work of ours identified in theory a number of security vulnerabilities in trust and reputation systems, weaknesses that might be exploited by malicious agents to bypass the protections offered by such systems. In this work, we begin by developing the TREET testbed, a simulation platform that allows for extensive evaluation and flexible experimentation with trust and reputation technologies. We use this testbed to experimentally validate the practicality and gravity of attacks against vulnerabilities. Of particular interest are attacks that are collusive in nature: groups of agents (coalitions) working together to improve their expected rewards. But the issue of coalitions is not unique to trust and reputation; rather, it cuts across a range of fields in multiagent systems and beyond. In some scenarios, coalitions may be unwanted or forbidden; in others they may be benign or even desirable. In this document, we propose a method for detecting coalitions and identifying coalition members, a capability that is likely to be valuable in many of the diverse fields where coalitions may be of interest. Our method makes use of clustering in benefit space (a high-dimensional space reflecting how agents benefit others in the system) in order to identify groups of agents who benefit similar sets of agents. A statistical technique is then used to identify which clusters contain coalitions. Experimentation using the TREET platform verifies the effectiveness of this approach. A series of enhancements to our method are also introduced, which improve the accuracy and robustness of the algorithm. To demonstrate how this broadly-applicable tool can be used to address domain-specific problems, we focus again on trust and reputation systems. We show how, by incorporating our work into one such system (the existing Beta Reputation System), we can provide resistance to collusion. We conclude with a detailed discussion of the value of our work for a wide range of environments, including a variety of multiagent systems and real-world settings.

Reputation systems have the potential of improving the quality of on-line markets by identifying fraudulent users and subsequently dealing with these users can be prevented. The behaviour of participants involved in e-commerce can be recorded and then this information made available to potential transaction partners to make decisions to choose a suitable counterpart. Unfortunately current reputation systems suffer from various vulnerabilities. Solutions for many of these problems will be discussed. One of the major threats is that of unfair feedback. A large number of negative or positive feedbacks could be submitted to a particular user with the aim to either downgrade or upgrade the user's reputation. As a result the produced reputation does not reflect the user's true trustworthiness. To overcome this threat a variation of Bayesian Reputation system is proposed. The proposed scheme is based on the subjective logic framework proposed Josang et al. [65]. The impact of unfair feedback is countered through some systematic approaches proposed in the scheme. Lack of anonymity for participants leads to reluctance to provide negative feedback. A novel solution for anonymity of feedback providers is proposed to allow participants to provide negative feedback when appropriate without fear of retaliation. The solution is based on several primitive cryptographic mechanisms; e-cash, designated verifier proof and knowledge proof. In some settings it is desirable for the reputation owner to control the distribution of its own reputation and to disclose this at its discretion to the intended parties. To realize this, a solution based on a certificate mechanism is proposed. This solution allows the reputation owner to keep the certificate and to distribute its reputation while not being able to alter that information without detection. The proposed solutions cater for two modes of reputation systems: centralised and decentralised. The provision of an off-line reputation system is discussed by proposing a new solution using certificates. This is achieved through the delegation concept and a variant of digital signature schemes known as proxy signatures. The thesis presents a security architecture of reputation systems which consists of different elements to safeguard reputation systems from malicious activities. Elements incorporated into this architecture include privacy, verifiability and availability. The architecture also introduces Bayesian approach to counter security threat posed by reputation systems. This means the proposed security architecture in the thesis is a combination of two prominent approaches, namely, Bayesian and cryptographic, to provide security for reputation systems. The proposed security architecture can be used as a basic framework for further development in identifying and incorporating required elements so that a total security solution for reputation systems can be achieved.