Trust management through reputation mechanisms

The members of electronic communities are often unrelated to each other; th ey may have never met and have no information on each other's reputation. T his kind of information is vital in electronic commerce interactions, where the potential counterpart's reputation can be a significant factor in the negotiation strategy. Two complementary reputation mechanisms are investiga ted which rely on collaborative rating and personalized evaluation of the v arious ratings assigned to each user. While these reputation mechanisms are developed in the context of electronic commerce, it is believed that they may have applicability in other types of electronic communities such as cha trooms, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc.