FloodTrust for Improved Trust Transitivity

For assessing its peers´ credibility, an agent can use the new Flood Trust trust metric inspired by the water flow in a system of pipes and reservoirs. Pipe discharges model agent peers´ trustworthiness, whilst a reservoir´s capacity is an inverse measure of the node´s competence for a specific issue. The trust of an agent towards another one is estimated by the filling speed of the reservoir associated with the latter when flooded. Flood Trust allows extrapolating trust between similar tasks, assessing its transitivity in an intuitive manner and revealing the most influential network arcs. Comparisons made with existing trust metrics on illustrative examples show an improvement of the Flood Trust for specific issues.