• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Information Technology Applications Conference
• /
• 2006.06a
• /
• pp.437-462
• /
• 2006

The objective of this study is to investigate what factors influence a major role in building trust on Internet shopping mall and to examine whether these factors on trust have differences between Korean and Chinese users. Based on relevant literature review, this study posits six factors of transaction security, perceived reputation, Perceived size, interactivity, propensity of trust, and familiarity as key determinants of trust in internet shopping mall. Analysis of 470 responses(Korean: 320 users, Chinese: 150 users) of survey questionnaire indicates the following; First, in terms of the relationship between influencing factors and the trust, five factors of transaction security, perceived reputation, perceived size, interactivity, and propensity to trust have a significant positive effects on the trust. Second, the differences between Korean and Chinese users are transaction security, perceived size, and familiarity. In conclusions, we suggested the factors to create user trust in internet shopping mall. Also we suggested differences in the determinant factors between Korean and Chinese users, and discussed some policies to build the trust in each user types.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.177-191
• /
• 2013

Social network has been expected to increase the value of social capital through online user interactions which remove geographical boundary. However, online users in social networks face challenges of assessing whether the anonymous user and his/her providing information are reliable or not because of limited experiences with a small number of users. Therefore. it is vital to provide a successful trust model which builds and maintains a web of trust. This study aims to propose a prediction method for the interpersonal trust which measures the level of trust about information provider in Facebook. To develop the prediction method. we first investigated behavioral research for trust in social science and extracted 5 antecedents of trust : lenience, ability, steadiness, intimacy, and similarity. Then we measured the antecedents from the history of interactive behavior and built prediction models using the two decision trees and a computational model. We also applied the proposed method to predict interpersonal trust between Facebook users and evaluated the prediction accuracy. The predicted trust metric has dynamic feature which can be adjusted over time according to the interaction between two users.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.197-215
• /
• 2012

SNS has been recognized as a means of expanding social capital by promoting interaction and efficient communication among users. On the other hand, there are serious concerns on negative side of social network which is often called epidemics. Trust plays a critical role in controlling the spread of distorted information and vicious rumor as well as reducing uncertainties and risk from unreliable users in social network. This study focuses on what the antecedents of interpersonal trust are in social network. We performed online survey from 252 Twitter users and tested candidate antecedents which are chosen from previous literature. As a result, propensity to trust of trustor, ability and sincerity of trustee, intimacy between trustor and trustee significantly affected to the interpersonal trust in Twitter.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.39-56
• /
• 2010

We are sometimes interacting with people who we know nothing and facing with the difficult task of making decisions involving risk in social network. To reduce risk, the topic of building Web of trust is receiving considerable attention in social network. The easiest approach to build Web of trust will be to ask users to represent level of trust explicitly toward another users. However, there exists sparsity issue in Web of trust which is represented explicitly by users as well as it is difficult to urge users to express their level of trustworthiness. We propose a fuzzy-based inference model for Web of trust using user behavior information in social network. According to the experiment result which is applied in Epinions.com, the proposed model show improved connectivity in resulting Web of trust as well as reduced prediction error of trustworthiness compared to existing computational model.

• Proceedings of the Korea Database Society Conference
• /
• 2010.06a
• /
• pp.277-287
• /
• 2010

We are sometimes interacting with people who we know nothing and facing with the difficult task of making decisions involving risk in social network. To reduce risk, the topic of building Web of trust is receiving considerable attention in social network. The easiest approach to build Web of trust will be to ask users to represent level of trust explicitly toward another users. However, there exists sparsity issue in Web of trust which is represented explicitly by users as well as it is difficult to urge users to express their level of trustworthiness. We propose a fuzzy-based inference model for Web of trust using user behavior information in social network. According to the experiment result which is applied in Epinions.com, the proposed model show improved connectivity in resulting Web of trust as well as reduced prediction error of trustworthiness compared to existing computational model.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.41-53
• /
• 2011

Trust prediction between users in social network based on the trust propagation assumes properties of transitivity and composability of trust propagation. But it has been hard to find studies which test on how those properties have been operated in real social network. This study aims to validate if the longer the distance of trust paths and the less the numbers of trust paths, the higher prediction error occurs using two real social network data set. As a result, the longer the distance of trust paths, we can find higher prediction error when predicting level of trust between source and target users. But we can not find decreasing trend of prediction error though the possible number of trust paths between source and target users increases.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.191-205
• /
• 2013

Recently, the topic of predicting interpersonal trust in online social networks is receiving considerable attention, because trust plays a critical role in controlling the spread of distorted information and vicious rumors, as well as reducing uncertainties and risk from unreliable users in social networks. Several trust prediction models have been developed on the basis of transitivity and composability properties of trust; however, it is hard to find empirical studies on whether and how transitivity and composability properties of trust are operated in real online social networks. This study aims to predict interpersonal trust between two unknown users in social networks and verify the proposition on whether and how transitivity and composability of trust are operated in social networks. For this purpose, we chose three social network sites called FilmTrust, Advogato, and Epinion, which contain explicit trust information by their users, and we empirically investigated the proposition. Experimental results showed that trust can be propagated farther and farther along the trust link; however, when path distance becomes distant, the accuracy of trust prediction lowers because noise is activated in the process of trust propagation. Also, the composability property of trust is operated as we expected in real social networks. However, contrary to our expectations, when the path is synthesized more during the trust prediction, the reliability of predicted trust did not tend to increase gradually.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.113-127
• /
• 2016

Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.24 no.1
• /
• pp.169-185
• /
• 2017

This study proposes a novel recommendation algorithm that reflects the results from trust/distrust network analysis as a solution to enhance prediction accuracy of recommender systems. The recommendation algorithm of our study is based on memory-based collaborative filtering (CF), which is the most popular recommendation algorithm. But, unlike conventional CF, our proposed algorithm considers not only the correlation of the rating patterns between users, but also the results from trust/distrust relationship network analysis (e.g. who are the most trusted/distrusted users?, whom are the target user trust or distrust?) when calculating the similarity between users. To validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we applied it to a real-world dataset that contained the trust/distrust relationships among users as well as their numeric ratings on movies. As a result, we found that the proposed algorithm outperformed the conventional CF with statistical significance. Also, we found that distrust relationship was more important than trust relationship in measuring similarities between users. This implies that we need to be more careful about negative relationship rather than positive one when tracking and managing social relationships among users.

• 한국경영정보학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2007.11a
• /
• pp.571-576
• /
• 2007

Advanced online environment and communication technology have made the e-commerce environments evolved rapidly. In the e-commerce area, one of the most important concepts regarding the relationship between seller and buyer is the "trust." Considering the purpose of purchase and satisfaction of website, the users may face problems such as consumer's transaction security or personal information sharing when they make transactions over web sites. It could be difficult to pursue the goal for the users to purchase product or service over online if the seller or service provider cannot establish trust to the customers. In this paper, through multi-dimensional viewpoints of trust, satisfaction can be accounted for by cue-based trust and experienced trust. The purchase intention mediates the experienced trust when online users purchase products or use online service.