Title: Users' attachment in trust networks: reputation vs. effort

Authors: Vincenza Carchiolo; Alessandro Longheu; Michele Malgeri; Giuseppe Mangioni

Addresses: Dipartimento di Ingneria Elettrica, Elettronica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania I-95126, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingneria Elettrica, Elettronica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania I-95126, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingneria Elettrica, Elettronica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania I-95126, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingneria Elettrica, Elettronica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania I-95126, Italy

Abstract: Trust and reputation systems gained great attention in the last decades. Such systems aim at giving users a quantitative evaluation about the trustworthiness of other users. Several metrics achieve it by combining the past direct experience of all the users of the trust network. Among the methods developed to assess trust, EigenTrust is one of the most popular, based on an adaption of the PageRank metric to trust systems. In this paper, we investigate EigenTrust dynamics, trying to explain some hidden behavioural patterns. Our aim is to show that EigenTrust metric exhibits some counterintuitive behaviours when compared to the common sense notion of trust.

Keywords: trust networks; reputation systems; recommendation systems; recommender systems; Eigentrust dynamics; network dynamics; trustworthiness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2013.055450

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2013 Vol.5 No.4, pp.199 - 209

Received: 01 Jun 2012
Accepted: 24 Sep 2012
Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article