Applying Recent Enhancements in Reputation Based Mechanisms for Promoting Trust in Mobile Communities

One inherent problem with virtual communities is how to assess the trustworthiness of unknown peers. Reputation based trust mechanisms are one means to help users decide whether to rely on a stranger or not. Using eBay’s feedback forum as an example, we show how simple reputation based trust mechanisms work. We evaluate shortcomings of these mechanisms and give an overview of reasonable enhancements. Later we show how effectiveness is improved by various means including policy based trust measures and using more sophisticated models for calculating reputation values. When applying the mechanisms to mobile communities, we realize that they have specific requirements of reputation based trust mechanisms such as decentralized reputation storage. With these results, we analyze which enhancements fulfill the given requirements. Next we describe a hypothetical reputation based trust mechanism for a virtual community.