Towards a Society that Rewards Trust:

Reinventing the Oath for Peer-to-Peer Use in Social

Networks

How the Oath will Save Humanity and Transform the Sharing Economy
Erik Gainor, Founder
Oathocracy
erik.gainor@oathocracy.com

Christopher Griffin, Ph.D.

griffinch@ieee.org

-1-

The irreversible decline of the oath in our time is a crisis in which the very being of man as a political
animal is at stake. Paolo Prodi [Agamben, 2010]

Abstract
Oaths are the most basic element of the evolution of social and economic communities. They have
played an essential role in the expansion of trust and cooperation in human societies since the
beginning of time. Despite their non-contractual nature, oaths are fundamental to building democratic
and cooperative infrastructures that reinforce personal identity and shape social spaces that decrease
the economic cost of cooperation and increase prosperity. We argue that the oaths recent collapse in
value in the information age poses significant challenges to the growth of the sharing economy, which
relies heavily on decentralized ecosystems fueled by trust between consumers and service providers.
The economic cost of this collapse is amplified in the sharing economy where traditional forms of social
norm enforcement such as contracts, legal sanctions, and surveillance have a negative value. We
introduce Oathocracy, a novel social app that acts as a delivery system of the oath for peer-to-peer use
in social networks. Oathocracy provides peers with a proven set of social norm enforcement tools
designed around a proprietary reputation system and a third-party enforcement mechanism that
maximizes the value of the oath in peer-to-peer interactions. This gives cooperation and trust the
advantage in a social network environment, setting the stage for the reinvention of the oath as the
fundamental building block for the emergence of new trust communities. Additionally, we compare and
contrast Oathocracy with other popular social networks and reputation systems that fail to meet the
requirements necessary for social trust to thrive in larger populations. Finally, we show that Oathocracy
has the potential to open up new democratic spaces based on trust; lowering the economic cost of
cooperation and creating economic opportunities that would otherwise lie dormant in a sharing
economy limited by high levels of distrust.

Introduction
A new grassroots model of doing business is emerging, providing consumers with the power to get what
they want and need at a less personal and environmental cost [Gansky,2010]. This emerging economic
model, a broad trend that is impacting every sector of society and business, is called the sharing
economy [Finley, 2013] and it is fueled by cooperation and trust. Uber, Airbnb, and Turo are just a few
companies capitalizing on a trend that is expected to grow in value from $15 Billion in 2013 to $335
Billion by 2025.

Sharing Economy Sectors

Traditional Rental Sectors

Source: PwC research

-2-

Unfortunately, social trust, the sharing economys most valuable currency, has reached its lowest levels
in recent history. This loss of trust has had catastrophic psychological, sociological and economic effects
on populations that extend well beyond the limits of the sharing economy. We argue that the
socialization of distrust is the worlds largest roadblock to widespread social happiness, political stability,
and economic prosperity. Distrust has infiltrated the consciousness of individuals and permeated our
social fabric in ways yet to be fully understood. We are now more connected than ever, yet our social
bonds are weaker than ever. Network cultures such as Facebook and Twitter, designed with the aim of
connecting as many people as possible continue to shape new forms of sociality that have accelerated
this effect. The emerging culture of distrust has led to the reliance upon contracts, legal sanctions, and
surveillance as the primary mechanisms of social norm enforcement; all of which drastically increase the
economic cost of cooperation.
This paper highlights recent multi-disciplinary studies that provide supportive evidence for a novel
approach to solving the global trust problem by reinventing the oath for peer-to-peer use in social
networks. We draw on clinical and scientific research as evidence for the use of the Oath as a symbolic
quilting point that ties together the essential components necessary to meet the unique requirements
of a sustainable social trust model. Moreover, we provide theoretical and empirical support for
Oathocracys proprietary reputation system and social norm enforcement methodology designed to
maximize the value of the oath in peer-to-peer interactions. This support relies heavily on recent game
theory literature tied to strength-of-ties, residential mobility, reputation, third-party punishment (3PP)
and altruism [Roos et al. 2014]. Additionally, we show how Oathocracy is different-in-kind from other
online reputation systems and computational trust models popularized by consumer service websites
and social networks such as Amazon, eBay, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook where trust plays a major role
in the evolution of social and economic infrastructures.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: We provide a brief discussion of the Oathocracy app
and its primary features. We then discuss why the Oathocracy app is needed, while briefly touching on
the increasing level of distrust in political institutions. In the final sections, we highlight the recent
research results upon which Oathocracy is built and provide conclusions to this white paper.

What is Oathocracy?
Oathocracy is a peer-to-peer social network with the primary function of empowering its users to
create, track and witness oaths (sworn promises) with each other and score the outcome (pass/fail) of
those oaths. On Oathocracy, a user can initiate an oath with another user or group of users. Oaths may
be unidirectional (in which a promisor is called upon to keep a promise) or mutual (in which the
promisor and promisee are both called upon to keep a promise with each other).
One or more witnesses may be added to any oath. A witness acts as an independent third-party to verify
whether an oath has been successfully completed. All oaths must be completed by a date/time
(completion date) set by the promisor and/or promisee. Upon the completion date, Oathocracy queries
all participants in the oath to determine whether the oath has succeeded or failed. A proprietary scoring
algorithm computes the binary (pass/fail) data generated from each oath, along with the historical
performance and network characteristics to generate a reputation score for each user in the system.

-3-

This score, which ranges from 200 to 1000 provides an independent assessment of a users
trustworthiness over the long run. The scoring mechanism is designed to prove resilient to sophisticated
Sybil attacks (see, e.g., [Kesidis et al. 2009]

Sample Screenshots of Oathocracy

The elements of Oathocracys design are based on clinical and scientific research in psychology,
neuroscience, systems theory, and evolutionary game theory; all fields that have contributed to the
growing interest in human cooperation and trust. The simplicity of the underlying concepts and design
of the system minimize friction in making oaths with others within the network. Oath-keeping activity
builds social trust amongst peers, ultimately translating into social and economic capital by minimizing
the economic cost associated with high levels of distrust. The independent scoring function provides
users with a benchmark by which to measure themselves and others; to optimize their trustworthiness
as individual oath-keepers i.e. Oathocrats.

Why is Oathocracy Needed?

We discuss the economic and social costs of mistrust and the failure of current technology and social
networks to mitigate this problem. We then illustrate how this pervasive lack of trust threatens the
viability of democratic forms of life.
The Social and Economic Cost of Distrust
Trust is the social glue that enables collaborative consumption marketplaces and the sharing economy
to function without friction. [Rinne et al. 2013:4]

-4-

The economic cost of distrust is estimated to be well into the billions, making it the most costly obstacle
to future economic growth and prosperity. Recent data by the World Values Survey revealed that the
amount of social trust in a given country has a direct correlation to per capita Gross National Income
(GNI). Countries that have more social trust are correlated to a higher per capita GNI. Countries with
less social trust are correlated with a lower GNI. This is a complex global problem and the amount of
social distrust is trending higher, not lower.
The world has a diverse population of both honest and dishonest people, self-interested narcissists,
opportunists, and altruists. We ask the following question: is it possible to induce a majority of these
different personality traits towards trust and cooperation, and away from the reliance upon coercive
enforcement mechanisms that continue to perpetuate a culture of distrust?

World Values Survey

Unfortunately, the most popular response to the trust problem has been an increase in the reach of
legal sanctions, regulation, and surveillance; all of which are coercive mechanisms enforced by a central
authority. This has the effect of increasing levels of distrust, thereby making decentralized systems such
as the sharing economy more vulnerable to systematic gamification tactics and fraud. The negative
correlation between increased regulation and decreased social trust has been well documented [Aghion,
2010]. If this trend continues, it could threaten to paralyze the exponential growth potential of a
sharing economy fueled by trust and cooperation.

-5-

Centralized Authority

De-Centralized Authority

Do to the reliance upon a centralized authority for structural support, coercive force is highly ineffective
at regulating human behavior in decentralized systems without a central authority. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the sharing economy, where government regulation is racing to catch up to the
disruptive technology of Airbnb and Uber. Regulatory systems simply cannot keep pace with the speed
of change in the sharing economy. Additionally, popular online reputation systems such as peer-to-peer
reviews and five-star rating systems continue to be susceptible to Sybil attacks as they fail to activate
the deeper psychophysiological registers tied to human promise-keeping behavior and trustworthiness,
as we discuss in the next section. Oathocracy is the only peer-to-peer social network that bridges the
gap between the promise-making psychology of the oath and evolutionary game theory norms that
provide a framework for the proliferation of trust in larger populations.
The Systematic Failure of Consumer Reviews and Online Reputation Systems
Consumer review websites such as Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Angies list have exploded in
popularity, and now exist for virtually every product and service in the global marketplace. Although
studies show that these reviews have a direct impact on sales, recent empirical evidence reveals a
widespread amount of systematic review fraud on these online platforms [Luca & Zervas, 2015],
threatening the long-term viability of the customer review model. This problem is so pervasive that
research is now underway to automatically detect fake reviews [Fayazi et al., 2015]. Review fraud
undermines the legitimacy of five-star rating systems designed to reward vendors that deliver on their
promises with their customers. The Amazon-owned crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk has
workers that can be hired for as little as 25 cents per review to post fake five-star reviews and In 2004,
Amazon unintentionally revealed the identities of anonymous reviewers, briefly unmasking
considerable self-reviewing by book authors. [Luca & Zervas, 2015]. There has been a significant
amount of effort to minimize the negative impact that review fraud has on customer review websites.
In the case of Yelp, a filtering algorithm is used to flag suspicious reviews and remove them from the
main Yelp page, yet over 65% of Yelps online reviews are between four and five stars. This is compared
to only 22% that are one and two star reviews. These statistics instill serious doubt in the ability of fivestar rating systems to stymie the growing amount of distrust that people have in the customer review
model.
As long as there is a market for customer reviews, there will be a competing market for customer review
fraud. We argue that the inherent deficiencies in the customer review model lend themselves to
perpetual gamification tactics that undermine social trust.

-6-

Distrust in Politics
The level of distrust in political institutions is reaching new heights in the US as well as globally. Recent
US data shows that less than 10% of people in the US rate the honesty of members of congress as very
high or high. This is the lowest of all other professions with the exception of lobbyists.
There are many competing theories as to why distrust in political institutions has become the status
quo, but most theorists agree on one thing: the dire level of institutional distrust in the political
enterprise is hollowing out the very core of democracy. Democracy thrives on trust and the kernel of
that trust is the willingness of populations to make and keep promises and oaths with other citizens.
This includes those made between elected government officials and their constituents.
The rapid growth of communicative networks such as social media has devalued language to the point
where the ability to make and keep promises is becoming an impossibility. Promises and oaths have
been replaced by meaningless language games that have little social or economic value. Democratic
forms of life will not thrive unless oaths are raised to the consideration of a higher order. There are two
ways to limit the freedom of speech: 1) limit ones right to speak and 2) devalue ones speech to its zero
degree of meaning. The former was the primary concern of pre-information age social theorists, but the
latter is a much larger threat to the survival of democratic institutions.
Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical behavior of people in these different fields very high,
high, average, low, or very low?

How do we salvage speech from being devalued into meaningless code? And how do we preserve a
sense of political agency in what is spoken? Oathocracy accomplishes this by providing a cooperative

-7-

social infrastructure that preserves the ability of peers and politicians to put their reputation at stake in
the oaths and promises they make with each other. This opens up the potential for new democratic
spaces that draw on the power of the oath to transform speech into action.

Why the Oath?

But in taking an oath, it is our duty to consider not what one may have to fear in violation but wherein
its obligation lies. Cicero [Agamben, 2010]
The oath has a long and storied human history that lies at the foundations of ancient and modern
civilizations. Swearing of oaths was a common social practice in the ancient Greek world. Oaths
regulated behavior in the court of law, commercial, civic, and international relations. Burnett states,
the oath stood like the primeval pillar that supports the sky. [Burnett, 1973] and Karavites argues that
the ancient Greeks were the most promise-conscious society on record [Karavites, 1992]. The power of
the oath made it a valuable tool as a social norm enforcement mechanism that was used to validate
agreements that varied in magnitude from everyday promises to highly ceremonial oaths such as
treaties. Even the gods were bound by their oaths, but as the world grew larger, social bonds grew
weaker and contracts and legal sanctions began to replace trust as the primary mechanisms used to
regulate social behavior.
In light of the Oaths undeniable anthropological foundations, we ask the following questions:

What is the cause of the oaths recent decline in value?

Can the oath be reinvented to have value in a globalized world?

The current social and economic deficiencies caused by distrust require the community-building
qualities of the oath more now than ever. No other social tool is as equipped to respond to the unique
challenges that have emerged as a result of the increasing speed, distance, and mobility unique to the
sharing economy. Legal contract enforcement and litigation practices are slow and costly, placing
extreme limitations on the growth of the globalized economy. Social networks have amplified the trust
problem by flooding the market with meaningless information exchange that has hindered the
performative ability of language to transform speech into action. The Oath, on the other hand, is a low
cost, highly adaptive, and scalable symbolic quilting point that can provide a communicative framework
for trust and cooperation across all geographical, sociological, and economic boundaries. That said, an
Oath has little economic benefit if used in isolation between peers. In order for the Oath to have
currency in larger populations, it must be supported by a cooperative infrastructure that includes a
number of social-constraints such as: high-strength-of-ties, a strong reputation system and third-party
enforcement mechanisms [Roos et al. 2014]. Otherwise, dishonest behavior gains the evolutionary
advantage across populations.

-8-

On the Psychology of Promising

In his book Promises, Oaths, and Vows, Hermert Schlesinger, Ph.D. professor of clinical psychology at the
University of Columbia, gives a fascinating portrayal of the psychology of promising as it is revealed in
the lives of his patients. He begins the book by pointing out that there is very little scientific research
regarding the ability of people to make and keep promises. This omission of promising as it relates to
morality is also highly representative of the work in developmental psychology. This is a surprise to
Schlesinger, given his clinical observations that reveal the act of promising as a defining act of moral
maturity. For the purposes of this paper we focus on three qualifications as they relate to the act of
promising:
1) The promisor must have a clear sense of self and other and understand the difference between
the two.
2) The promisor must have the cognitive maturity to unite word with deed.
3) In order to elevate a simple intention to a binding promise, the promisor and promisee must
draw on the invocation of a credible witness.
Without all three of these qualifying components, the formula of the promise fails in larger populations.
This failure is the primary cause of a modern cultural regression into self-interested behavior that can
only be regulated through coercive forms of social norm enforcement such as legal sanctions and
surveillance.
We selected the above three qualifications related to the act of promising because they are particularly
susceptible to a highest risk of failure in a social network environment. As social networks grow larger,
the environmental stress placed on identity and language threaten the stability of small-world
boundaries that have historically supported trust and cooperation. Although increased connectivity has
extended identity beyond its traditional boundaries, it has also stretched the distance of linguistic
communication to its extreme limitations, resulting in a systematic identity crisis of mass proportions.
Stable identities have been replaced by schizophrenic online avatars that are under constant pressure to
adapt to the rapidly changing currents of social media. [Squicciarini and Griffin, 2014] capture this
quantitatively and argue that all online behavior is caused by individuals attempting to minimize a social
stress function that comes from balancing their own internal moral tendencies the self with the peer
pressure the other that they feel. More recent work suggests that social pressure increases
proportionally over time, leading to behaviors that completely blend the behavior preferred by the self
and the behavior preferred by the other [Ratjmajer et al., 2016]. As such, it is becoming increasingly
more difficult to identify the boundaries between self and other due to the flattening effect that global
networks have on identity. Oathocracy is designed with the necessary infrastructure to counter this
network effect by reinstituting a sense of self in the oaths that peers make. Peer-to-peer oaths act as a
supportive identity reinforcement mechanism that empowers people to construct stable social identities
that can be clearly distinguished from self and other in a highly populated network environment.

-9-

The human being is that living being that, in order to speak, must say I, must take his word, assume
it and make it his own. [Agamben 2010]
Once the territories between self and other are successfully identified within a network, actors must
then have the ability to unite promises with deeds. Because the oath is a symbolic device uniquely
situated within language, its value is inescapably tied to the binding force of the speech-act and the
deed by which the oath is solemnly sworn to perform. In order to maximize the binding force of the
oath in a social network environment, Oathocracy universalizes the first-person verbal formula I
promise as the commencing speech-act that initiates all peer-to-peer oaths. Preserving the ability to
self-reference oneself in the promise-making procedure is a foundational component of the oath
structure. This is in contrast to the alienating effect that legal contracts have on identity, which has
furthered the divide between promises and deeds by extracting the first-person verbal formula from the
contract and flattening identity into a legal entity defined by a bundle of rights. This significantly
reduces the moral pressure associated with making a promise and replaces it with legal sanctions.
Consistent with this point of view is the work of [Shu et al. 2012], who argues that contracts are
ineffective at preventing fraud as they are constructed today. In particular, one way to increase
adherence to contract terms is to alter the point at which the contract is signed. Gino et al. shows that
signing at the top (rather than the bottom) actually improves contract adherence. In essence, signing at
the top establishes the self within the contract and, in essence, transforms the contract making process
into an oath making process in which the contract metaphorically becomes a promise. By signing at the
top, Gino et al. are essentially creating an environment in which the contract signatories are saying, I
promise.
This brings us to arguably the most overlooked qualification of the act of promising: the invocation of a
credible witness to guarantee the fulfillment of the promise. This three-party relationship paradigm
as it is described by Schlesinger is a foundational element of the promise that exponentially increases
the amount of moral pressure between the promisor and the promisee. This paradigm has been
instituted as a fundamental building block of Oathocracys peer-to-peer application. Evolutionary game
theory research, discussed in more detail later, has provided additional evidence that the third-party
paradigm i.e. third-party punishment (3PP) induces self-interested agents towards cooperation in
structured populations (see [Roos et al., 2014], [Paulson and Griffin, 2015] and [Griffin et al. 2012]).
Simply put, without a credible third-party to witness peer-to-peer oaths, cooperation and trust will not
prove evolutionarily stable in a social network [or most human] environment(s). In fact, one of the
unsolved problems of experimental game theory is the emergence of trust and altruism in situations
where optimal play suggests distrust and defection should be the strategy of choice [Camerer & Thaler
1995]. Oathocracys proprietary witness mechanism is designed to reinforce the spread of trust and
altruism across social networks.

-10-

Evolutionary Game Theory: The Missing Link in a Sustainable Social Trust Model
Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is a mathematical framework by which contests, strategies, and
analytics can be modeled in an evolutionarily competitive environment. Although it was originally
designed to model biological evolution, it has become highly useful for modeling social systems and how
those systems evolve over time. In particular, the study of cooperation and trust in human populations
has become a popular course of research in recent years [Kappler, P., Schaik, C. 2006]. As in [Griffin and
Squicciarini 2012], we focus on the social application of EGT and its use in analyzing human decision
situations in which an individuals payoff to cooperate and trust others is dependent on the actions of
others in his/her social network. Further, we provide support for Oathocracys reputation system and
third-party punishment (3PP) mechanism i.e. witnessing as the fundamental building blocks for a
distributed social norm maintenance system that gives cooperation and trust the advantage in larger
populations.
Survival of the fittest player class is the underlying principle that drives theoretical evolutionary game
models. Each species within an evolutionary game is given a strategy and these individuals compete with
each other, reproducing in accordance with successful game play. In particular, when distrust
outperforms trust, populations drift towards distrustfulness even if as a whole the population would be
better off encouraging trust [Weibull, 1996].
Oathocracy makes use of empirical work in EGT that shows the behavioral impact that high-strength-ofties, reputation, and third-party-punishment (3PP) have when it comes to effectively inducing selfinterested agents to cooperate in structured populations [Roos et al., 2014]. Roos et al. provide
empirical data proving that direct punishment between peers is not enough to induce self-interested
agents towards cooperation. Drawing on research in sociology and psychology, they illuminate
conditions under which 3PP can evolve and induce self-interested agents towards cooperation where
other mechanisms fail to do so.
When modeling the interactions between Cooperators (always cooperates), Defectors (never
cooperates), and Opportunistic Agents (doesnt cooperate unless it knows that it will attain a higher payoff by cooperating) in a structured population model, Roos et al. show that there is a direct correlation
between the proportion of credible 3PP agents and the number of cooperators in a population. This
reinforces the importance of Oathocracys proprietary third-party witnessing mechanism as a
fundamental component that induces self-interested agents towards cooperation. The more credible
witnesses there are to administer responsible punishment, the more likely it is that cooperation gains
the evolutionary advantage. In addition, High-strength-of-ties (measured by the strength between two
humans in terms of how often they interacted with each other during a period of time) and low-mobility
(the degree to which humans are able to change their position within the social network of a
population) are additional social constraints factored into Oathocracys reputation algorithm. This is
supported in works by [Ratjmajer et al., 2016] and [Squicciarini and Griffin, 2014] who argue that human
behavior is originated by the desire to minimize social stress, caused by conflict between what a social
group wants and what the self wants. Strong social ties can produce a force multiplier when cooperation
is encouraged. In essence cooperation becomes self-reinforcing.

-11-

One critical aspect of traditional EGT is the randomness of interaction between players; i.e., players
within an evolutionary game cannot choose with whom they interact. When choice is added to the
system and individuals can tell who is trustworthy and who is not, trust becomes evolutionarily stable.
That is, a small body of trustworthy players can drive out untrustworthy players and generate more
trust.
Oathocracys witness and reputation system (reputation score) rewards users who behave in
trustworthy ways; i.e., making and keeping oaths with each other. The transparency of the system
coupled with 3PP through the witness mechanism creates conditions where trust is given an advantage
over distrust, thus breaking the classic Prisoners Dilemma1 [Griffin 2011] paradox.
As far as we know, there are no other social network models designed with the social constraints
necessary to successfully induce self-interested agents toward cooperation and trust. Oathocracys
unique cooperative infrastructure incorporates high-strength-of-ties, reputation, and 3PP to significantly
increase the probability of cooperation to prove evolutionarily adaptive in a network environment. This
ultimately decreases the economic cost of cooperation and trust, making them viable strategies for
peers and vendors that exchange goods and services in the sharing economy.

Conclusion
People who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and
regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive
means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call transaction
costs. Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic
activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay. [Fukuyama, 1995]
This paper provides a theoretical framework for the reinvention of the oath as the most basic element
of support for a sustainable social trust model. We argue that Oathocracys propriety reputation system
and evolutionary game theoretic design provide social networks with the cooperative infrastructure to
give trustworthy behavior the evolutionary advantage. Our research reveals that traditional coercive
social norm enforcement mechanisms such as legal sanctions and surveillance have extreme limitations
in the sharing economy, while perpetuating a culture of widespread social distrust. Further, online
reputation mechanisms such as consumer reviews and five-star rating systems fail to activate the
deeper psychophysiological registers specific to promise-keeping behavior. This makes these systems
particularly susceptible to gamification tactics, review fraud, and Sybil attacks.
Oaths are one of the oldest human-specific psychological mechanisms fostering cooperation and trust
[Thomas et al. 2009]. They are not simply personal promises; they are an institution supportive of a
cooperative social infrastructure. Society rests on the integrity of individual oaths and the unique verbal
formula (I Promise) of the oath effectively increases the amount of moral pressure on self-interested

1 Prisoners dilemma is a classic two player, two strategy game in which two prisoners would do better to trust that the other

player will not confess to a crime. The game is designed so that mistrust is the optimal choice individually, but trust is the
optimal global choice, thus creating the paradox.

-12-

agents to favor trustworthy behavior. That said, the increase in moral pressure from the oath-making
procedure alone is not enough to give trust and cooperation the evolutionary advantage in larger
populations. The long-term economic payoffs tied to trust and cooperation must outweigh the short
term benefits of distrust. Otherwise, the social trust that has traditionally tied our personal, business,
and political lives together will continue to tear apart at the seams. This has the potential to impose
significant limitations on the future growth of democratic forms of life and other decentralized systems
such as the sharing economy. We offer Oathocracy as a novel peer-to-peer social app designed to solve
this problem.

-13-

Bibliography
Agamben, G. (2010): The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Stanford
Cambridge, UK: University Press. Print.
Aghion, P., Algan, Y., Cahuc, P., Shleifer, A. 2010. Regulation and Distrust. The Quarterly Journal
of Economics (August, 2010). pp. 1015-1047.
Baumgartner, T., Fischbacher, U., Felerabend, A., Lutz, K., Fehr, E. (2009). The Neural Circuitry
of a Broken Promise. Neuron 64, no. 5, pp. 756-770.
Burnett, A. (1973). Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge. Classical Philology, Vol. 68, 1.
(January). pp. 1-24.
Camerer C. and Thaler, R. H. (1995) Anomalies: Ultimatums, Dictators and Manners. The Journal
of Economic Perspectives, 9, no. 2, pp. 209-219 (Spring)
Dashtipour, P. (2009). Contested Identities: Using Lacanian Psychoanalysis to Explore and
Develop Social Identity Theory, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 320-337.
Fayazi, A., Lee, K., Caverlee, J., Squicciarini, A. (2015). Uncovering Crowdsourced Manipulation
of Online Reviews, Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research
and Development in information Retrieval, New York, NY.
Finley, K. (2013). Trust in the Sharing Economy: An Exploratory Study. Centre for Cultural
Political Studies, University of Warwick. (September).
Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster Inc. Print.
Glifor, V., Wing, J. (2011). Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers.
Presented at the 19th International Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge, UK (March).
Griffin, C. (2011) Game Theory: Penn State Math 486 Lecture Notes, Version 1.1.1 (169 pages).
Available Online: http://www.personal.psu.edu/cxg286/Math486.pdf
Griffin C., Mercer, D., Fan, J. and Squicciarini, A. (2012) Two Species Evolutionary Game Model
of User and Moderator Dynamics. ASE Human Journal, 1(3):152-165.

-14-

Hamblin, J. (2014). Always Make Promises: Living up to a social contract is inordinately

valuable, and theres no pressure to exceed it. The Atlantic. (August)
Hoffman, K., Zage, D., Nita-Rotaru, C. A (2016) Survey of Attack and Defense Techniques for
Reputation Systems. Department of Computer Science and CERIAS, Purdue University. Online,
Last Accessed: February 2016.
Karavites, P. (1992). Promise-Giving and Treaty-Making: Homer and the Near East. Leiden, The
Netherlands: E.J. Brill. Print.
Kesidis, G., Tangpong, A. and Griffin, C. (2009) A sybil-proof referral system based on
multiplicative reputation chains. IEEE Comm. Lett., 13(11):862-864, November.
Luca, M., Zervas, G. (2015). Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review
Fraud. Harvard Business School. Working Paper. (May)
Paulson, E. and Griffin, C. (2015) Cooperation can Emerge in Prisoner's Dilemma from a MultiSpecies Predator Prey Replicator Dynamic. Submitted to Mathematical Biosciences, July.
Preprint.
Rajtmajer, S., Griffin, C. and Squicciarini, A. (2016) Constrained Social-Energy Minimization for
Multi-Party Sharing in Online Social Networks. In Proc. International Conference on Autonomous
and Multi-agent Systems, Singapore, May 9 - 13.
Rinne, A., et al. (2013). Position Paper: Young Global Leaders Sharing Economy Working Group.
World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Taskforce: Circular Economy Innovation & New
Business Models Initiative. Online: http://www.slideshare.net/ CollabLab/ygl-sharing-economyposition-paper-final-june-2013/. Last Accessed, February 2016.
Roos P., Gelfand M., Nau D., Carr, R. (2014). High strength-of-ties and low mobility enable the
evolution of third-party punishment. Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20132661.
Schlesinger, H. (2008). Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising. New York,
NY: Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 2008. Print.
Sherchan, W., Nepal, S., Paris, C. (2013). A Survey of trust in social networks. ACM Comput.
Surv. 45, 4, Article 47 (August), 33 pages.
Shu Lisa L., Mazar, Nina, Gino, Francesca, Ariely, Dan and Bazermanc, Max H. (2012) Signing at
the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to
signing at the end. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 109, no. 8, pp. 1519715200.
-15-

Somerstein, A., Fletcher, J. (2007). Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society. Exeter, UK: Bristol
Phoenix Press. Print.
Squicciarini, A. and Griffin, C. (2014) Why and How to Deceive: Game and Complexity Results
with Sociological Evidence. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 4(1):1-13, March.
Yeatman, A., Hansen, P., Magdalena, Z., Barbour, C. Action and Apperance: Ethics and the
Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt. New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing
Company. Print.
Yu, Xing. (2015). Language and State: A Theory of the Progress of Civilization. Lanham,
Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: University Press of America. Print.
Wolcher, L. (2008). Laws Task: The Tragic Circle of Law, Justice and Human Suffering.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Print.

-16-