A Novel Approach to Propagating Distrust

Trust propagation is a fundamental topic of study in the theory and practice of rankingand recommendation systems on networks. The Page Rank [9] algorithm ranks web pagesby propagating trust throughout a network, and similar algorithms have been designed forrecommendation systems. How might one analogously propagate distrust as well? This is aquestion of practical importance and mathematical intrigue (see, e.g., [2]). However, it hasproven challenging to model distrust propagation in a manner which is both logically consistentand psychologically plausible. We propose a novel and simple extension of the Page Rankequations, and argue that it naturally captures most types of distrust that are expressed insuch networks. We give an efficient algorithm for implementing the system and prove desirableproperties of the system.