It is not well understood how privacy concern and trust influence social interactions within social networking sites. An online survey of two popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, compared perceptions of trust and privacy concern, along with willingness to share information and develop new relationships. Members of both sites reported similar levels of privacy concern. Facebook...

Service discovery and selection approaches are often done using a centralized registry-based technique, which only captures common Quality of Service criteria. With more and more services offered via social networks, these approaches are not able to evaluate trust in service providers and often fail to comply with new requester’s expectations. This is because theses approaches are not able (i) ...

This paper builds a theory of trust based on informal contract enforcement in social networks. In our model, network connections between individuals can be used as social collateral to secure informal borrowing. We de…ne network-based trust as the highest amount one agent can borrow from another agent, and derive a reduced-form expression for this quantity which we then use in three application...

Social computing and online communities are changing the fundamental way people share information and communicate with each other. Social computing focuses on how users may have more autonomy to express their ideas and participate in social exchanges in various ways, one of which may be peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Given the greater risk of opportunistic behavior by malicious or criminal co...

Social networks have become the main infrastructure of today’s daily activities of people during the last decade. In these networks, users interact with each other, share their interests on resources and present their opinions about these resources or spread their information. Since each user has a limited knowledge of other users and most of them are anonymous, the trust factor plays an import...

Trust is broadly construed as a willingness on the part of individuals to put their wellbeing in the hands of other persons. In survey research it is typically assessed at a societal level by asking questions about “others” in a community, while in experimental research, it most often refers to decisions made in situations involving two persons, where reciprocated trust has the potential to imp...

Nowadays dozens of people share their content in the current Web 2.0 space, talk with friends in social networking sites such as Facebook and live on the Net in many other ways. They do all this quite naturally, forgetting the healthy cautiousness sometimes. In real life we rely on trusted people. Do we know how to reflect real-world trust mechanisms into on-line social software? In the article...

The trust building process is basic to social science. We investigate it in a laboratory setting using a novel multi-stage trust game where social gains are achieved if players trust each other in each stage. And in each stage, players have an opportunity to appropriate these gains or be trustworthy by sharing them. Players are strangers because they do not know the identity of others and they ...

Drawing on the existing theoretical literature, a conceptual model of trust is developed. The model suggests that trust in technology, institutional trust, and social trust are three dimensions of the overarching trust construct that should be considered in models of technology acceptance. The preliminary empirical evidence suggests that institutional trust and social trust are important factor...