Research Interests

I'm interested in combining the trust benefits of small communities with the convenience benefits of the global community in an online setting. I'm using various aspects of game theory and bits and pieces from all over the place in an attempt to create a better reputation management system which can convince people to Do The Socially Acceptable Thing online.

One way I would describe this is that I have a background in mathematics, work in a computer science department, attend the odd philosophy or political theory seminar, read economics papers, learn aspects of psychology, and think deeply about sociology. In case I've missed anything I then socialise with chemists, engineers and biologists to name a few. After that I wrap it into a bundle that looks like game theory and call it a day.

What do I hope to achieve from the thinly spread attention to each of this assortment of fields? As the demographics of the world are changing I think the social complexity of the world is quickly reaching the limit of where humans can not make decisions which look sensible to even themselves because of the many layers of obfuscation involved in the unconscious calculation of payoffs from different possible actions.

The changing structure of networks also means that a number of fitness strategies are no longer as beneficial as they once were, so defection in games becomes more commonplace. From here I feel the approach of single-mindedly labelling people as "good" or "bad" or on any such scale is largely insufficient (or inefficient at least) because it neglects the fact that people who make such "bad" choices have good individual reasons to do so, meaning that finding more efficient ways to punish defectors will only have a very limited success, particularly in the online and pseudonymous domain where punishments can only feasibly be very low anyway.

My current work focuses on applying these concepts to online auction sites.

Publications

(To Appear) R. Martin-Hughes, J. Renz, Examining the Motivations of Defection in Large-Scale Open Systems, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM-SAC-08), Fortaleza, Brazil, March 2008. (pdf file)

(To Appear) R. Martin-Hughes, Cooperation in Growing Communities, IFIP Trust Management (IFIPTM-08), Trondheim, Norway, June 2008. (pdf file)