Trust Analysis Through Relationship Identification

Current mechanisms for evaluating the trustworthiness of an agent within an electronic marketplace depend either on using a history of interactions or on recommendations from other agents. In the first case, these requirements limit what an agent with no prior interaction history can do, and in the second case, they transform the problem into one of trusting the recommending agent. However, these mechanisms do not consider the relationships between agents that arise through the interactions between them, such as buying or selling, or through overarching organisational structures, which can also aid in evaluating trustworthiness. In response, this paper outlines a method that enables agents to evaluate the trustworthiness of their counterparts, based solely on an analysis of such relationships: relationships are identified using a generic technique in conjunction with an ontological model for agent-based marketplaces; they are then interpreted through a trust model that enables the inference of trust valuations based on the different types of relationships. In this way, we provide a further component for a trust evaluation model that addresses some of the limitations of existing work.