Interpersonal Trust and Similarity

Abstract

Recently, the integration of computational trust models [Marsh, 1994b; Mui et al, 2002; McKnight and Chervany, 1996] into recommender systems has started gaining momentum [Montaner et al, 2002; Kinateder and Rothermel, 2003; Guha, 2003; Massa and Bhattacharjee, 2004], synthesizing recommendations based upon opinions from most trusted peers rather than most similar ones. Likewise, for social filtering within a spread out and decentralized recommender framework, we cannot rely upon conventional collaborative filtering methods only, owing to the neighborhood computation scheme’s poor scalability. Some more natural and, most important, scalable neighborhood selection process schemes become indispensable, e.g., based on trust networks.