A Generalized Stereotypical Trust Model

Stereotypical trust modeling can be adopted by a buyer to effectively evaluate trustworthiness of a seller who has little or no past experience in e-marketplaces. The buyer forms trust stereotypes based on her past experience with other sellers. However, when the buyer has limited past experience with sellers, the formed stereotypes cannot accurately reflect her trust evaluation towards sellers. To address this issue, we propose a novel generalized stereotypical trust model. Specifically, we first build a semantic ontology to represent hierarchical relationships among seller attribute values. We then propose a fuzzy semantic decision tree (FSDT) learning method to construct trust stereotypes that generalizes over seller non-nominal attributes by splitting their values in a fuzzy manner, and generalizes over nominal attributes by replacing their specific values with more general terms according to the ontology. Experimental results confirm that our proposed model can more accurately measure the trustworthiness of sellers in simulated e-marketplaces where buyers have limited experience with sellers.