Providing Rating Services and Subscriptions with Web Portal Infrastructures

Abstract

A Web infrastructure (portals) for providing online rating of services such as financial services, are becoming more popular nowadays. A rating portal providing comparisons between competitive services has the potential of becoming a well-established Web enterprise. For some services, the comparison is performed based on a set of measurable values such as performance and price, for example, when the service involves computer hardware. In such an environment, services can make a rational decision whether they wish to advertise on the portal based on the set of measurable values (compare with Tennenholtz, 1999). However, for some services like banking, brokerage, and other financial services characterised by such parameters as customer support quality, it is impossible to establish an objective set of measurable values. In these cases, the rating portals publish their scores for the competing businesses based on their own private estimation strategy. We believe that evolution of the interactions between the agents being rated and rating agents is an important social process, which is worth examining thorough simulation.