Quantifying Social Influence in Epinions

Author

Patil, Abhijit ; Ghasemiesfeh, Golnaz ; Ebrahimi, Roozbeh ; Jie Gao

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Stony Brook Univ., Stony Brook, NY, USA

fYear

2013

fDate

8-14 Sept. 2013

Firstpage

87

Lastpage

92

Abstract

In many eCommerce websites and consumer review websites, users can review products they purchased as well as the reviews others wrote. Users can also rate each other as trusted or untrusted relationships. By studying a data set from Epinions, we examine and quantify the correlation between trust/distrust relationships among the users and their ratings of the reviews. We discover that there is a strong alignment between the opinions of one´s friends and his/her ratings. Our findings also suggest that there is a strong alignment between the collective opinion of a user´s friends and the formation of his/her future relationships.

Keywords

data mining; electronic commerce; social networking (online); Epinions; collective opinion; consumer review Websites; eCommerce Websites; product review; social influence quantification; untrusted relationship; user trust relationship; Computational modeling; Correlation; Electronic commerce; Internet; Joining processes; Measurement; Social network services; distrust; influence; social networks; trust;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Social Computing (SocialCom), 2013 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Alexandria, VA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SocialCom.2013.20

Filename

6693317