Design and validation of a relative trust model

When considering intelligent agents that interact with humans, having an idea of the trust levels of the human, for example in other agents or services, can be of great importance. Most models of human trust that exist assume trust in one trustee is independent of trust in another trustee. The model introduced here addresses so-called relative trust. The idea of relative trust is that trust in a certain trustee not only depends on the experiences with that trustee, but also on trustees that are perceived competitors of that trustee. Such models for relative trust contain parameters to represent the specific dependency between trust for different trustees. In order to tailor the model towards a specific human, dedicated parameter estimation techniques are used. The validation shows that such a model for relative trust is able to predict human trust based behaviour significantly better compared to a benchmark model. 1 Work presented in this paper is a significant extension of the works published in: Hoogendoorn, M., Jaffry, S.W., and Maanen, P.-P. van., Validation and Verification of Agent Models for Trust: Independent compared to Relative Trust. Proc. of the International Conference on Trust Management, (TM'11). Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol. 358, Springer Verlag, 2011, pp. 35-50. Hoogendoorn, M., Jaffry, S.W., and Treur, J., An Adaptive Agent Model Estimating Human Trust in Information Sources. In: Baeza-Yates, R., Lang, J., Mitra, S., Parsons, S., Pasi, G. (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT'09. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2009, pp. 458-465.