Business impact of online institutional recommendation

Abstract

Institutional recommendation is an important factor for building trust in business or social interactions. Institutional ratings are issued by trusted authorities such as public bodies or reference publications. They assess people's expertise, the quality of products or services or the economic health of companies among other. Institutional ratings are characterized by objective and repeatable evaluations, based on well defined criteria and issued by institutions that build their own reputation on the quality of their assessment. However, on the Internet today, they lack adequate support that would encourage their usage and allow them to play a role as significant as they already have in off-line relationships. This article presents the potential of transposing existing institutional recommendation mechanisms on the Internet and describes new business models and scenarios that could be enabled. © 2009 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.