Incorporating Interdependency of Trust Values in Existing Trust Models for Trust Dynamics

Many models of trust consider the trust an agent has in another agent (the trustee) as the result of experiences with that specific agent in combination with certain personality attributes. For the case of multiple trustees, there might however be dependencies between the trust levels in different trustees. In this paper, two alternatives are described to model such dependencies: (1) development of a new trust model which incorporates dependencies explicitly, and (2) an extension of existing trust models that is able to express these interdependencies using a translation mechanism from objective experiences to subjective ones. For the latter, placing the interdependencies in the experiences enables the reuse of existing trust models that typically are based upon certain experiences over time as input. Simulation runs are performed using the two approaches, showing that both are able to generate realistic patterns of interdependent trust values.