Quantified Prestige (QP) is a positive peer-to-peer reputation system intended to reward positive behaviour in a wide range of contexts.
- Positive means that only positive reputation scores exist within QP. Negative reputation is outside of the scope of the system.
- Peer-to-peer means that reputation is generated within a specific social network through esteem from other peers
- Reputation is modelled as Prestige $(\mathbb{P})$ score of an individual. The maximum possible Prestige score scales linearly with the number of persons in the social network. Persons are the first-order entities which can get reputation within QP. Second-order entities like groups of users, organisations, goods, or services can get reputation within QP, too, when those are linked to associated persons.
Variants of Quantified Prestige
Each single instance of QP in a social network is called a Quantified Prestige Network (QPN). There are different dimensions in which QPNs can differ from one another:
- Complexity: Ranging from a minimalistic Quantified Prestige Light variant to the Quantified Prestige Full variant with full system complexity.
- Centralisation: A QPN can be centralised or decentralised.
- Standalone or embedded: A QPN can be an embedded component of the software infrastructure of a social network, or it can be an independent standalone application that may or may not communicate via APIs with other applications.
- Currency coupling: A QPN can be coupled to (digital) currencies in order to generate reputation-based incomes (reputation incomes for short).
- Context: A priori, the Prestige $(\mathbb{P})$ score of a QPN user is a number without inherent meaning. It only gains meaning though the context in with the QPN is used. That context may be very specific, for example the quality of academic publications within a very narrow field of science, or it can be very broad, in which case Prestige can be interpreted as a measure for the general positive reputation of a person.
What is the Purpose of Quantified Prestige?
The primary motivation for QP is to provide a basis for a reputation-based economy, which could enable digital abundance, a state in which nearly all digital goods are available for free. Nevertheless, QP has more immediate applications. It can be used as recognition system for people, and as basis for reward systems.
Intended use cases
QP can be used for a wide range of purposes:
- Companies can use QP to reward their workers through reputation-based bonus payments (see Employee Reward and Recognition Systems)
- Open source projects can reward contributors
- Consumers can rate products and services and reward their creators
- Once reputation data about products, services, companies, and other organisations is available, that data can be used to make better informed decisions
- Prestige scores may indicate the skill of specialists in specific areas of expertise
- QP can be used in social networks to indicate the general quality of the contributions of specific users
- In conjunction with a (digital) currency that is coupled to a QPN, it can be used to implement a group-specific or even global unconditional basic income
Inappropriate use cases
Since QP is different from other reputation systems, it may not be the ideal solutions for some fields in which reputation systems have been used traditionally:
- QP is not suited for rating the trustworthiness of participants in electronic marketplaces
- QP does not synthesize reputation from atomic automatically generated or aggregated data, so QP is not useful for dealing with such data
- Neither is QP a sufficient solution (at least on its own) for situations in which negative reputation needs to be used, for example spam filtering, or blacklisting for abusive behaviour
How does Quantified Prestige work?
QP has three distinct components, which work together to generate a reliable and meaningful Prestige score for each user of a QPN:
- The Esteem system, which deals with users “rating” other users
- The Authenticity (Auth) system, which protects the system from manipulation, in particular from Sybil attacks
- The Prestige system, which combines Esteem, Auth, and other data to generate a Prestige score for each user
The Prestige scores of a QPN are (usually) public data, which can be used by other applications for various purposes. One the most promising applications of QP is using the Prestige data of a QPN to generate reputation incomes.