1. Business Impact of Online Institutional Ratings Mihaela Ion & Regis Saint-Paul 17/06/2009 International Conference on Digital Business (DIGIBIZ) London, UK

3. Social vs. Institutional Ratings 1/4 Issued by specialized institutions A separate process from product consumption Repeated testing Any kind of assessment Access to the production facility Issued by peer consumers Through usage of service/product or company relations Only one product tested Only qualities publicly available Many information is not available to the user No complex assessments: Does Company A abide to EU environmental recommendation? Scope of rating IR SR

4. Social vs. Institutional Ratings 2/4 At least semi-formalized criteria through a series of guidelines, requirements Formal criteria: e.g. aerospace certification Less formal: e.g. diploma Poorly formal: e.g. restaurant ranking Errors or malevolent behavior, conflict of interest still possible Implicit (e.g. PageRank) or explicit (e.g. eBay) collection of ratings Implicit: a measure of popularity rather than quality Explicit: subjective, mixing of criteria, improper rating due to knowing only one product, malevolent behavior Method and quality of measures IR SR

5. Social vs. Institutional Ratings 3/4 Several business models possible Pay a fee to be ranked: e.g. professional certification, product homologation Renewal mechanism: validity limits (e.g. driver license) or periodic reevaluation (e.g. restaurant guide) Long time needed to collect feedback Cold start problem Feedback aggregated over the whole history or some period of time How to match the dynamics of the quality of service/company (e.g. sudden drop of quality)? Dynamics of the rating IR SR

6. Social vs. Institutional Ratings 4/4 Rating can be carried outside the institution: e.g. diploma, hotel stars The rating institution might allow public access to its assessments (e.g. hotel guides) or impose restrictions (e.g. grades, diplomas) Feedback is provided only to the web site that supports the community: e.g. eBay Feedback from different web sites cannot be aggregated or exchanged Provisioning to users IR SR

10. Mapping the IR domain to PKI/PMI CA 1 Rating authority (AA) e.g., IECQ Identity cert. Subject: AA PK of AA CA 2 Rating agency (RA) e.g., SGC Attribute cert. Holder: RA Attrib. of RA Rating metadata CA 2 Rated Entity (E) e.g., Fook Tin Technologies Rating cert. Holder: E Attrib. of E QC 080000 Defines standard Authorization Fook Tin Technologies Issues compliance certificate CA 1 Identity cert. PK of AA CA 2 CA 2 Compliance online Identity cert. Subject: RA PK of RA Identity cert. Subject: E PK of E Identity cert. Subject: RA PK of RA

13. Automatic rating translation Bio-I Rating metadata certificate Bio-T Bio-T issues rating certificate Automatic rating translation 1 Producer Institutional relations certificate …………….……….... Bio-I …………….…………. 2 3 4 Bio-T certificate submitted Bio-I issues new certificate Rating interoperability mapping Italy-Turkey

15. Thank you! Questions? [email_address]