Market Systems as a Source of Individual Contributive Social Capital Scores

Abstract

In online communication, it is often difficult to judge if an unknown person is competent, telling the truth or interested in honestly helping others. This leads to mistrust and social phenomena like echo chambers, misinformation campaigns, and fake news. Creating transparency by introducing contributive social capital (CSC), a metric encompassing the competence, trustworthiness, and social responsibility of a user, could alleviate this problem. In this paper, we investigate the utility of social capital market systems as information sources for the assessment of CSC. We conceptualize a market system that assigns CSC scores to its participants and continuously updates these scores according to market transactions. To test this system, we ran an experiment with 165 participants over the course of nine weeks. Market simulations were used for evaluating the system on a larger scale. The results indicate that market systems can be useful for the assessment of user characteristics like CSC. Social capital markets can be used on their own or as part of a larger system that integrates information from social networking platforms and personal or institutional endorsements.