A formalization of computational trust

Computational trust aims to quantify trust and is studied by many disciplines including computer science, social sciences and business science. We propose a formal computational trust model, including its parameters and operations on these parameters, as well as a step by step guide to compute trust in a real application. We make a distinction between trust statements that aim to capture the truth of a dynamic phenomenon and trust statements that aim to capture the truth of a static phenomenon. We elaborate on how this difference should be reflected in trust computation. To this end we apply a dynamic base rate (prior trust) as an alternative to the widely used fixed base rate.