A Trust Management Model for Virtual Communities

Virtual community is becoming a significant component in today’s world of open, decentralized networks. Trust management mechanism is crucial to fertilize the development of the virtual community. After the analysis of the features of virtual community, and various approaches for trust management model, we present a novel trust management model for virtual communities which depends on both process-based and institutional-based trust production. We propose some effective methods to address or alleviate some typical problems in virtual community trust management, such as the feedback incentive problem and malicious or false feedback problem. Our approach satisfies the time-dependence, history-dependence, and subjectivity properties of trust, especially the temporal feature of trust, and is suitable to the virtual community.