A Hybrid Trust Evaluation Framework for E-Commerce in Online Social Network: A Factor Enrichment Perspective

The nature of autonomy and openness of E-commerce in online social (ECOS) networks poses a challenge to the security of transactions as it is difficult to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of parties on both ends. Transactions in ECOS may, therefore, be conducted in an unreliable environment and be vulnerable to frauds. Trust management schemes, naturally, have come as feasible solutions. With a view to making improvement on the existing trust management mechanisms, we, in this paper, propose a factor-enrichment-based hybrid trust framework for trust measurement in ECOS, in which three levels of trust are used to establish trustworthy opinions among individuals for their transactions: 1) private reputation, which is defined as subjective trustworthy impression among individuals with respect to its feature of dynamic evolution; 2) common reputation, which is defined as collective and sharable trust degree and is proposed with two factors, a consistency factor and a continuity factor, introduced for enhancing the reliability of common reputation; and 3) the hybrid trust, which is proposed to obtain integrated trustable impressions based on private reputation and common reputation, with anti-fraud factor and confidence factor presented to further determine the trustworthiness of hybrid trust. Finally, we list the results of a series of examinations to further verify the performance of our mechanism.