Harnessing Recommendations from Weakly Linked Neighbors in Reputation-Based Trust Formation

Interactions between individuals are inherently dependent upon trust, no matter if they occur in the real world or in cyber communities. Over the past years, proposals have been made to model trust relations computationally, either to assist users or for modeling purposes in multi-agent systems. These models rely implicitly on the social networks established by participating entities (be they autonomous agents or internet users). However, state-of-the-art trust frameworks often neglect the structure of those complex networks. In this paper, we present a new approach allowing agent-based trust frameworks to leverage information from so-called weak ties that would otherwise be neglected. An effective and robust voting scheme based on an agreement metric is presented and its benefit is shown through simulations.