Trust-Aware Delivery of Composite Goods

The vast majority of the interactions in typical online communities nowadays is between complete strangers. In such settings reputation reporting and trust management models play a crucial role for proper functioning of those communities. A lot of work has been done on the issues of collecting and spreading reputations and subsequent computation of trust. The application of such data for decision making, however, is far less explored. In this paper we present a solution for scheduling exchanges among participants of an online community which takes into account their trustworthiness. In this way we can enable exchanges that would otherwise not be taking place. Thus this work also demonstrates that trust can in fact increase economic activity