Trust and Reputation Management

I nternet applications have evolved from centralized and private computing platforms to distributed and collaborative networked computing systems. Collaboration is a fundamental Internet computing capability, and collaborative computing represents a significant step toward the continued promotion of openness and social intelligence as Internet systems and applications evolve. However, trust and reputation management is essential for establishing a healthy and efficient collaboration among a network of participants and players that might not have sufficient prior knowledge about each other. Over the past decade, research in reputation-based trust systems has made remarkable progress in both theoretical foundation and practical deployment in real-world applications. A respectable number of e-commerce companies, such as Amazon, eBay, and NetFlix, have deployed reputationbased trust in ranking their products and suppliers. Such rankings are capitalized as effective incentives and lowcost mechanisms, letting e-commerce companies enhance product marketing and sale management. Reputationbased trust systems typically build trust on system participants’ social ratings, which take into account both the participant’s (or computing node’s) current social trust score and history of behavior in early transactions or interactions with others. Thus, applications often employ reputation-based trust to help identify and avoid malicious players, minimize the threat of dishonest or manipulative behavior, and protect a networked computing system from possible misuses and abuses. Trust and reputation management research is highly interdisciplinary, involving researchers from networking and communication, data management and information systems, e-commerce and service computing, artificial intelligence, and game theory, as well as the social sciences and evolutionary biology. Researchers have studied some trust and reputation management problems, such as aggregation algorithms or trust-based recommender systems, in different contexts. For example, some trust models and trustLing Liu Georgia Institute of Technology