I have moved to http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~clausen

Reputation Research

I am currently researching reputation systems at the University of Melbourne.

I am interested in how technology can decentralize commerce.

Firstly, technology provides cheap communication and computation. This means every consumer could conceivably find out what every other consumer thinks of products, and have this information summarized in a useful form. If this resulting reputation system were good enough, it might make it easier for smaller firms to compete: advertising would become less important, and transaction costs would decrease.

Secondly, technology provides cryptography which allows us to replace trusted third parties with decentralized protocols. Perhaps banks, auctioneers and stockbrokers can be replaced.

Articles

• Andrew Clausen, The Cost of Attack of PageRank, Proceedings of the International conference on Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce (IAWTIC'2004), Gold Coast, 2004. [ pdf ]
• Andrew Clausen, Online Reputation Systems: The cost of attack of PageRank, Honours thesis, The University of Melbourne, 2003. [ pdf ]
• Andrew Clausen, How much does it cost to buy a good Google PageRank?, Working Paper, 2003. [ pdf ]

  Superseded by my honours thesis.