Decentralized reputation systems have of late emerged as the prominent method of establishing trust among selfish agents in today’s online environments. A key issue is the efficient aggregation of data in the system; several approaches have hitherto been advanced, but are plagued by major shortcomings. We put forward a novel decentralized data management scheme grounded in gossip-based algorithms. Rumor mongering is known to possess algorithmic advantages, and indeed, our framework inherits numerous salient features: scalability, robustness, globality, and simplicity. We also demonstrate that our scheme motivates agents to maintain a sparkling clean reputation, and is inherently impervious to certain attacks.
Ariel D. Procaccia, Yoram Bachrach, Jeffrey S. Ros