• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.13B no.7 s.110
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• pp.633-642
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• 2006

In the Internet environment many interactions between many users and unknown users take place and it is usually rare to have the trust information about others. Due to the lack of trust information, entities have to take some risks in transactions with others. In this perspective, it is crucial for the entities to be equipped with functionality to accumulate and manage the trust information on other entities in order to reduce risks and uncertainty in their transactions. This paper is concerned with a quantitative computational trust model which takes into account multiple evaluation criteria and uses the recommendation from others in order to get the trust for an entity. In the proposed trust model, the trust for an entity is defined as the expectation for the entity to yield satisfactory outcomes in the given situation. Once an interaction has been made with an entity, it is assumed that outcomes are observed with respect to evaluation criteria. When the trust information is needed, the satisfaction degree, which is the probability to generate satisfactory outcomes for each evaluation criterion, is computed based on the empirical outcome outcome distributions and the entity's preference degrees on the outcomes. Then, the satisfaction degrees for evaluation criteria are aggregated into a trust value. At that time, the reputation information is also incorporated into the trust value. This paper also shows that the model could help the entities effectively choose other entities for transactions with some experiments in e-commerce.