Two Social Concepts in Virtual Communities: Trust and Reputation

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing trust and reputation models in virtual communities, compares different approaches, and introduces a new sociologically-based trust model to better understand social interactions online.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of trust and reputation models and proposes a novel sociologically-inspired trust model for virtual communities.

Findings

Existing models partly ignore social aspects

Comparison highlights strengths and weaknesses of models

New model incorporates sociological notions

Abstract

Our social interactions mainly depend on the social phenomenon called trust. We evaluate our trust in our peer to decide whether to start an interaction or not. When our information about the peer is not sufficient, we use the knowledge of others. This knowledge can also be referred to as the reputation of the peer in the community. Like real-life communities, trust and reputation play a key role in virtual communities, too. These two notions help us overcome the complex interactions between agents in virtual communities. In previous studies regarding this topic, the social aspect of trust and reputation is partly ignored. In this paper, we will review an article which we accept as a starting point and compare it with another article that provides a more advanced model. Additionally, a new trust model which is mainly based on sociological notions will also be introduced.