MNIKR: REPUTATION CONSTRUCTION THROUGH HUMANTRADING OF DISTRIBUTED SOCIAL IDENTITIES

byBrendan Francis O’ConnorA thesis submitted to The Johns Hopkins University in conformity with therequirements for the degree of Master of Science in EngineeringBaltimore, MDMay 2009Advised and Approved by Professor John Linwood Griﬃnc

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2009 Brendan Francis O’ConnorSome Rights ReservedCreative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

Abstract

Reputation forms an important part of how we come to trust people in face-to-face interactions, and thus situations involving trust online have come to realize thatreputation is an important characteristic in the digital age. We propose a new holis-tic and context-free approach to quantifying reputation on the Internet, based upona stock exchange where users can trade reputation shares of other users and obtaingoodwill dividends, including new algorithms for identifying and creating digital iden-tities not inherently tied to a user’s personally identiﬁable information. We developedsuch a system, named Mnikr, and deployed our system on the Internet for a monthto demonstrate and evaluate this approach. Our results suggest that existing pub-lic data sources can indeed be used to create an overarching social network whoseutility is greater than its number of users would indicate, and in which reputationmeasurements are generated that are actually indicative of each user’s standing insociety.Advisor: Professor John Linwood Griﬃn

Acknowledgements

This thesis never could have been written without the patient dedication of myadvisor, Professor John Linwood Griffin, to the onerous task of making sure I actuallysat down and put thoughts on paper on occasion, in addition simply to talking hisear off for hours in his office. In addition, I am very grateful to those people who readmy thesis, suggested new ideas, and argued with me in late-night conversations overtheories of privacy, identity, and economics, including Michelle Tellock, Michael May-ernick and the pseudonymous Shade, as well as those people who provided significanthelp in the writing process, including April Lynn Grotberg and Nick Howard.This work is dedicated to my family; to my parents, who continue to send foodeven in graduate school, to my brother, who has kept me from starting mid-sized in-ternational disputes despite my reasons for doing so, and my sister, who has persistedin cooking dinner on occasion and discussing disgusting things over it for the entiretyof her four years at Hopkins.

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