Trust and Trust Mechanims in EventHive

As the use of the Web increases and more people integrate Web-enabled technologies into their daily lives, the need to establish trust, and have computational and software-based mechanisms to do so, becomes increasingly important. In general terms, trust exists when people expect positive effect from another and accept the vulnerability included [1]. It primarily represents a psychological phenomenon about decision making in a situation that one cannot achieve a goal unless relying on another. In the Web environment, trust is the foundation of online activities for different websites. Trust mechanisms aim to offer secure and trustworthy information environment for users.

In this blog post, Yani will explain how users currently make trust decisions on the Web. Then, this post will analyse three trust mechanisms associated with Eventhive and how we expect to verify trust amongst event organisers, verify trust amongst users, and illustrate how to generate trust between event organisers and users.

Trust Decision-Making

Trust decisions in social networks is a common phenomenon. Internet users are continuously and frequently been asked, or required, to make trust-based decisions. They occur not only when a user registers with an online service and agrees to terms and conditions, but trust-based decisions also occur because they are presented with many competing services that they have to decide between.

As Lewis and Weigert stated in their study, during the process of trust decision-making people will more likely rely on ‘system trust’ rather than ‘interpersonal trust.’ In other words, it means that highly emotional trust from one’s family and friendship groups is trusted compared to highly rational trust from professional relationships, government and other broader institutions [3].

Currently in the Web environment, trust factors take various forms that are connected with statistics, other user comments, organization description, and so on. For instance, users will more likely to trust a retailer on eBay that has a higher rating, has more positive feedback, or sells more products compared to others.

Trust Mechanisms and EventHive

There are three types of trust mechanisms, policy-based trust, provenance-based trust and reputation-based trust, which build schemes to calculate trust. These mechanisms provide users with a variety of ways to make a trust decision based on personal emotion, social, and economic choice. EventHive have taken into consideration different ways in which it can introduce trust mechanism their reflect users’ experiences. Yani will now explain these types of trust mechanisms and how they are incorporated into EventHive.

Policy-Based Trust

Policy-based trust is an approach that relies upon trusted third parties as the authority. The policy is sometimes referred to as network security credentials, which are verified through security protocols and grant the 3rd party certain access rights [2]. The more security information provided to users, the more likely a user will  trust the website. On the Eventhive platform, this trust mechanism is reflected in the ticket selling process, where a user is directed to book a ticket from trusted specialised ticket sellers, or the event organisers’ preferred retailer.

Provenance-Based Trust

Provenance-based trust refers to the origin of information or sources, such as author, publisher, etc. and this provides a way to evaluate trust [4]. Because provenance data is transparent, users are able to track and analyse the past transaction process that led to something’s existence and can use this information to make a trust decision. Taking this into account, Eventhive will offer users the data of event attendees and the event organisers’ event history, including information of events they have organised in the past.

Reputation-Based Trust

Reputation-based trust supports trust decisions that are based on personal experience, or the experience from others. Trust mechanisms quantify these experiences on a website [2]. Users can get a general view of a website, not only about the quality feedback of services and products from other users, but also the description of the website, such as registration rules, company information and other content available in the website. It would be more likely to gain trust from web users if an organisation has higher ratings captured from website’s users, or if a website can provide more practical information (location, opening time, age limit of using the website, and etc.) to establish trust to users when they first access it.

In Eventhive, users can assess the popularity of events and make trust decision by using an event organiser rating system as well as the event popularity algorithm “Buzz Count” (for more information on “How “Buzzin” is That Event? – The Buzz Count Algorithm & Popularity Metric,” see Jack’s post on this topic).

Summary

This blog post has introduced you to the problem of trust on the Web, the factors that influence when users make trust decisions, and it has explain three related mechanisms in Eventhive. In order to provide users with trustworthy environment, Eventhive has taken into account the dynamics of trust on the Web and introduced trust mechanisms that reflect these issues.

References

[1] D. M. Rousseau et al., “Not so different after all: a cross-discipline view of trust,” Academy of Management Review, vol. 23, pp. 393-404, 1998.

[2] D. Artz et al., “A survey of trust in computer science and the semantic web,” Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, vol. 5 (2), pp. 58-71, 2007.

[3]  J. D. Lewis et al., “Trust as a social reality,” Social Forces, vol. 63, pp. 967-985, 1984.

[4] L. Moreau, “The foundations for provenance on the web,” Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 2009.