Context dependent trust

From TrustLet, a free, collaborative project for collecting and analyzing information about trust metrics.

In common language we say A trusts B in the field X. Translating it in a more formal language we say trust is associated to two subjects or "agents" (the truster and the trustee) and a context. Trust context is usually used and sometimes trust scope and trust purpose.

The intuition is that I might trust you about babysitting but not about fixing my car (this is the trust context).

It is hard to have information about different trust contexts and usually every community (web site) is devoted to just one trust context: in ebay the trust context is the ability to be a good seller or buyer, in epinions is in providing useful reviews of items, etc.

Assuming that a system knows trust statements about more than one trust context, it is possible to imagine some trust context mapping (or portability or inference or propagation): i.e. if the system knows that A trusts B as 0.8 as a violin player, how much the system can infer A will trust B about guitar playing? Maybe 0.7? About fixing cars?

There are some papers which proposed the idea but we don't know of real experiments about this. (The usual example is about babysitting and mechanic or fixing car so you might try these keywords as well associated with trust or trust context.)

Some papers which introduced the topic:

• Review on Computational Trust and Reputation Models ^[1] "Is trust/reputation context dependent? If we trust a doctor when she is recommending a medicine it does not mean we have to trust her when she is suggesting a bottle of wine. The reputation as a good sportsman does not help if we are looking for a competent scientist. It seems clear that the answer is yes: trust and reputation are context dependent properties."
• Context-aware Trust Evaluation Functions for Dynamic Reconfigurable Systems
• Simplification and Analysis of Transitive Trust Networks ...
• T. Grandison and M. Sloman, "A Survey of Trust in Internet Applications," IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, vol. 3, 2000.
• A. Jøsang, R. Ismail, and C. Boyd, "A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision," Decision Support Systems, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 618–644, 2007.
• (there are surely more, probably at least one in the context of mobile computing and ad hoc wireless network but not sure)
• blog post about a conference http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000055.html

[edit] References

1. ↑ Sabater, J.; Sierra, C. (2005). "Review on Computational Trust and Reputation Models (link)". Artificial Intelligence Review 24 (1): 33-60. Retrieved on 2007-09-19.