With the advent of online social networks, recommender systems have became crucial for the success of many online applications/services due to their significance role in tailoring these applications to user-specific needs or preferences. Despite their increasing popularity, in general recommender systems suffer from the data sparsity and the cold-start problems. To alleviate these issues, in re...

This study explores the determinants (demographic, personal, behavioural, and social) by which happy and unhappy people differ. The primary sample from which the participants were chosen was a representative sample of Croatian citizens (N = 4000). On the basis of the distribution of overall happiness the sample of the highest (the happy group) and the lowest 10 % of participants (the unhappy gr...

BACKGROUND This paper explores the nature and reasoning for (dis)trust in Australian public and private hospitals. Patient trust increases uptake of, engagement with and optimal outcomes from healthcare services and is therefore central to health practice, policy and planning. METHODS A qualitative study in South Australia, including 36 in-depth interviews (18 from public and 18 from private ...

Due to increasing proliferation of smart devices, many users store a significant proportion of personal data on them. Thus, personal sensing applications that sense a user’s context via his smart device have significant privacy implications. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study of privacy, trust, risks and other concerns of users with smart phone based context-aware personal sensing s...

From the early days of the information economy, personal data has been its most valuable asset. Despite data protection laws, a shadow market is trading personal information without accountability to consumers. As a result, consumers are becoming more and more irritated and lose trust. The lack of transparency, accountability and trust in PI markets fosters market concentration and impedes serv...

Dr. Carlo Urbani was the first person to recognize Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in a Hanoi, Vietnam, hospital. On March 29, 2003, only one month after the discovery, Dr. Urbani died from the disease, largely because of his belief that it is a doctor’s duty to “stay close to the victims.” His wife, Giuliani, mother of three, challenged her husband on the point; Dr. Urbani replied, “I...

While work organization and social capital are known to be important factors for offshoring success, there is little empirical evidence on how these aspects evolve in the course of offshoring projects. In the literature, trust has been discussed as a personal disposition to abstain from control in a given situation, and was found to remain surprisingly stable in some cases. By analyzing the rel...

Trust propagation is the principle by which new trust relationships can be derived from pre-existing trust relationship. Trust transitivity is the most explicit form of trust propagation, meaning for example that if Alice trusts Bob, and Bob trusts Claire, then by transitivity, Alice will also trust Claire. This assumes that Bob recommends Claire to Alice. Trust fusion is also an important elem...

E-commerce adoption has been extensive but for some specialized areas it is still in the early stages. One such area is health-related websites where the sensitive issues around the consumer’s health extenuate the similar challenges faced in other areas of e-commerce. Disclosing personal information is necessary to fully utilize such health-related websites but consumer trust is required for th...