The Effect of Behavior Change on Honesty Checking in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Reputation systems aim to reduce the risk of loss due to untrustworthy peers. This loss is aggravated by dishonest recommenders trying to pollute the recommendation network. The objective of an honesty checking mechanism is to detect dishonest recommenders. Existing honesty checking mechanisms assume that contradicting recommendations are due to the dishonesty of the recommenders. However, such difference may be also due to the behavior change of the target peer. This paper shows the effect of such behavior change on the performance of existing honesty checking mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at linking the behavior change to honesty checking.