Providing Rating Services and Subscriptions with Web Portal Infrastructures

Abstract

A Web infrastructure (portals) for providing online rating of services such as financial services, are becoming more popular nowadays. A rating portal providing comparisons between competitive services has the potential of becoming a well-established Web enterprise. For some services, the comparison is performed based on a set of measurable values such as performance and price, for example, when the service involves computer hardware. In such an environment, services can make a rational decision whether they wish to advertise on the portal based on the set of measurable values (compare with Tennenholtz, 1999). However, for some services like banking, brokerage, and other financial services characterised by such parameters as customer support quality, it is impossible to establish an objective set of measurable values. In these cases, the rating portals publish their scores for the competing businesses based on their own private estimation strategy. We believe that evolution of the interactions between the agents being rated and rating agents is an important social process, which is worth examining thorough simulation. In this study, we simulate the plausible interaction between portals and services using a simplified model, and we analyse possible scenarios of how services can influence the portals’ rating system. Our approach is based on a straightforward revenue model for rating portals, where they require the rated services to be paying to these portals in order to obtain a rating. Within this model, we follow the dynamics of how the competing services may influence the portals to improve their respective ratings. Over the last couple of years, the role of paid advertisement placement at Web portals has dramatically increased. Until recently, there were just one or two such advertisements per customer query displayed on keyword search portals. Nowadays, after Google’s IPO, the business model of paid placement has become very popular, and the majority of search engines have designated areas for displaying advertisement slots on their search results Web pages. This number of advertisement placements is expected to be growing even faster, and their order (from top to bottom) may be interpreted by users as a rating by a respective search portal. This is due to the fact that it is hard for end users to access the pricing policy for paid placements at keyword search portals (Sherman 2004). Therefore, possible mechanisms of providing such ratings and their evolution are worth exploring. We conduct the what-if study suggesting a simple model with rational agents for services and portals as possible for a simulation of the subscription model. This model is implemented and analysed in detail in Galitsky and Levene (2005). The resultant behaviour is verified and analysed with respect to the possibility of extracting patterns of rating subscription-based behaviour from real publicly available data. We conclude the article with a discussion of how the predicted subscription process fits into the current advertising models; also, the process itself is considered from the standpoint of conflict resolution in multi-agent systems.