Improving trust using online credibility sources and social network quality in P2P marketplaces

In p2p marketplaces, users often have to decide if someone is trustworthy or not. Sometimes, this decision is based purely on faith, which is something not everyone is willing to do. For this reason, trust has been identified as one of the key factors for the success of the sharing economy. Over the years trust mechanisms have been developed on a per site basis (i.e. feedback, voting or reputation systems) and users have been slowly building trust in these sites and leaving a reputation trail as they move from site to site. This process should be more efficient and users must be able to use the hard earned reputation to show they are trustworthy. To this end, we present a trust model for improving trust between users, normally in the context of p2p transactions, based on online credibility sources and social network quality metrics. In this paper we formally define a multi-dimensional trust model adapted to p2p marketplaces, introduce WhyTrusted.com prototype as a proof-of-concept that is able to capture, process, and translate data into relevant dimensions of the trust model to measure a person's perceived trustworthiness with a portable, cross-platform trust score, and use an empirical analysis to confirm that the WhyTrusted trust score and source ratings improve a user's propensity to trust.