Trust beyond reputation: Novel trust mechanisms

In recent years, people have taken a more active role in participating in massively distributed systems (e.g., Web 2.0 applications) by intensively interacting with other system participants. Such rich interactions enhance Internet experience significantly. However, due to the characteristics of such systems like openness, scale, heterogeneity, etc., it is difficult to ensure smooth/reliable interactions among the participants. Trust management, which aids automated decision-making process or alternatively provides decision support, is a popular approach to help participants to select the trustworthy interaction partners. Traditional reputation based trust mechanisms may be effective in certain scenarios, but they suffer from two main issues: (i) they often rely upon knowledge (i.e., historical information about past behavior of a specific agent) that may not actually be available or accurate to the assessor. (ii) Even if the required historical information is available, current mainstream methods simply investigate outcomes of the target agent’s past transactions to derive a single trust/reputation value (and sometimes, an additional confidence metric on that value), thus failing to detect dynamic behavio