EPFL Best thesis award for Radu Jurca, student at EDIC

Mr. Radu Jurca of the EDIC School received, end of April, the EPFL best thesis award for his work entitled "Truthful Reputation Mechanisms for Online Systems" under the supervision of Professor Boi Faltings. His thesis concentrates on the reliability of Internet forums. The internet offers tremendous opportunities for sharing feedback and ratings of products or services. Feedback forums, however, can be manipulated by users who deliberately lie with the ulterior motive of punishing or promoting particular items. Radu Jurca's thesis analyzes a complete range of settings for feedback mechanisms, and shows for the first time how to design incentives that make honest reporting the highest-paying equilibrium strategy even in the presence of large fractions of colluding raters that try to break the system. Applications are under way not only in online feedback forums, but also for less prominent problems such as self- monitoring of services.