Subject: [domainrep] fyi: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online

From: =JeffH <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:45:36 -0700

of possible related interest...

Subject: PCD 10/7/11 - Lada Adamic, University of Michigan, To Friend and Trust
From: Terry Winograd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 13:34:37 -0700
To: [email-masked], [email-masked],
	[email-masked], [email-masked],
	[email-masked], [email-masked],
	[email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]

Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design (CS547: HCI Seminar)
        http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/

October 7, 2011
12:50-2:00 pm, Gates B01

Lada Adamic, University of Michigan
       [email-masked]

To friend and to trust: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online

Online rating and reputation systems have shown themselves to be
essential for filtering content, building trust, and fostering
communities. However, these ratings should not be taken at face value.
When individuals submit ratings online, especially ratings of other
people, they are being asked to quantify inherently subjective
feelings. To complicate matters, they may formulate their ratings
differently if these are shown to others, and if those others can
reciprocate. In this talk I will present two studies that combine data
analysis of several online data sets. For one such system,
CouchSurfing.org, I will discuss findings from a large- scale survey
and in-depth interviews to examine from multiple angles the challenges
that users have in providing useful and truthful ratings. We find, for
example, that the potential to reciprocate produces higher and more
correlated ratings than when individuals are unable to see how others
rated them. Ratings further can depend on the gender, age and
nationalities of the raters and rates.All of these findings indicate
that ratings should not be taken at face value without considering
social nuances.

NEXT WEEK: Paul (Whitmore) Sas,
     Interaction Design for the Quantified Self