Multi-armed bandit policies for reputation systems

Abstract

The robustness of reputation systems against manipulations have been widely studied. However, the study of how to use the reputation values computed by those systems are rare. In this paper, we draw the analogy between reputation systems and multi-armed bandit problems. We investigate how to use the multi-armed bandit selection policies in order to increase the robustness of reputation systems against malicious agents. To this end, we propose a model of an abstract service sharing system which uses such a bandit-based reputation system. Finally, in an empirical study, we show that some multi-armed bandits policies are more robust against manipulations but cost-free for the malicious agents whereas some other policies are manipulable but costly. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.