Ranking

We rank students, papers, schools, ourselves and others. We rank the rich, riches and books. But over the web, ranking is a large scale monster, and more recently, it is derived from many different users (dogs?), whether collaborative, adversarial, or simply gameful. There are many ways to try to get "quality" ranking: by fiat, by appealing to good citizens, by policing them or letting them police each other, whatever. One approach is to provide incentives and develop a market around the users' utilities (juicy bones?). Setting up the incentive structure and mechanism is a complex problem. A recent paper does a nice job of formulating the questions and providing some solutions:

• Algorithms and incentives for robust ranking. . R. Bhattacharjee and A. Goel. SODA 2007. Earlier position paper, Incentive based ranking mechanisms in NetEcon 2006.