Trust and Distrust: A Reputation Ratings Approach

Abstract

Agents’ reputation ratings in a social network form a real valued matrix which is discounted with singular value decomposition (SVD) to estimate the trust and distrust levels of agents. SVD eliminates noise as future expected trust and distrust are based on current reputation ratings. A discounting of 20 percent is optimal, further discounting does not improve error reduction. Reputation and trust are closely related. Distrust is different from trust and reputation. Distrust is similar to trust negation; and trust is similar to distrust negation.