Evaluation of Professional Reputations as a Game: The Sociology of Knowledge, Game Theory, and Tokenized Registries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2023.3.2296Keywords:
reputation, professional communities, token-curated registries, sociology of science, game theory, coordination gamesAbstract
It is hard to overestimate the importance of reputation for the social world, for the successful functioning of institutions and for the decision-making of people and organizations. However, both the mechanisms of reputation and this very notion remain insufficiently clarified and researched in the social sciences. Is it possible to study and, more importantly, to make reputations public? We believe so, and in this article, we describe a possible method for doing so based on game theory (specifically, coordination games), an understanding of reputation as implicit social knowledge, the technology of token-curated registries (TCR), and the consensus of professional communities. The approach we describe allows investigating the presence of consensus within communities regarding the reputational properties of various objects (specific specialists, institutions, scientific journals, etc.). In this article, we explain tokenized registries as a prototype of our method that emerged in the blockchain and IT environments and the difficulties encountered when employing them to evaluate reputations in the real world. Next, we propose a sociological conceptualization of reputation as implicit social knowledge (versus its understanding as a form of capital) and point to the intersections between this conceptualization and game theory. Finally, based on these elements, we present an outline of the design and procedure of coordinated reputation games and highlight the advantages and limitations of the proposed method.
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