Reputation and Organisations

Abstract

An important role of reputation in the context of organisations is to implement mechanisms for norm enforcement and incentives so that agents behave as expected by the organisation they belong to. However, an organisation also provides other useful elements to compute reputation for that issue. As a collective phenomenon, reputation is better thought of as embodied in an organisation. The chapter “Reputation and Organisations” discusses the links and opportunities raised by the integration of a multiagent reputation system within organisations. A first study is dedicated to the organisational concepts and entities that may contribute to reputation mechanisms. A survey of the elements of an organisation that can either be considered as trustees for social evaluation or act as informational sources is provided. The chapter describes then how reputation mechanisms can be seen and implemented as organisational processes. Finally, a few future research challenges of this combined view are proposed.