| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/N006062/1 |
| Title: |
Reputation, Trust, and Privacy in the Sharing Economy: A Network Science Approach |
| Principal Investigator: |
Livan, Dr G |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Department: |
Computer Science |
| Organisation: |
UCL |
| Scheme: |
EPSRC Fellowship |
| Starts: |
01 January 2016 |
Ends: |
30 November 2021 |
Value (£): |
807,635
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Complexity Science |
Economics |
| Human-Computer Interactions |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
This project will develop a complete statistical description of distributed online systems where interactions between users are driven by reputation. Such systems are epitomised by the emerging online marketplaces of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or Uber, where "micro entrepreneurs" and customers build a reputation through an online peer-review process.
Recent estimates project revenues from the top five sectors of the UK sharing economy to reach £9 billion within the next ten years. Such a fast growth will dramatically increase the interconnectedness between different online marketplaces and their users. This, in turn, will bring about the need to promote trust on large scales by merging the reputations developed by the same users on different platforms. Indeed, a few startup companies already offer embryonic services whose users receive a portable reputation score based on the aggregate of their public online activity. Similar practices will require digital personhood to become more and more transparent to others, with serious implications to online privacy.
This project will address the interplay between reputation, trust, and privacy lying at the core of the sharing economy. In order to do so, it will start from the observation that the sharing economy is a large complex network of interactions. As such, it falls squarely within the realm of application of Statistical Physics and Complexity Science, where collective macroscopic behaviour emerges from local interactions between elementary components. By taking this perspective, this project will produce a network vision of the sharing economy by first analysing data from platforms where reputation-driven interactions are at play, and by studying how reputation and trust between users form in online environments with the methods of Experimental Psychology. Then, by building upon this empirical and behavioural knowledge, network models capable of reproducing and predicting the macroscopic behaviour of complex online marketplaces will be designed.
The project's high-level objectives are:
1. To identify the main empirical and behavioural regularities of online marketplaces driven by reputation
2. To model trust and efficiency in sharing economies as collective network phenomena emerging from the interactions between users
3. To model the effects of reputation aggregation in realistic multi-platform sharing economies
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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