Characterizing Economic and Social Properties of Trust and Reputation Systems in P2P Environment

Abstract

Considering the fact that P2P (Peer-to-Peer) systems are self-organized and autonomous, social-control mechanism (like trust and reputation) is essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest and malicious peer behaviors. So, naturally, we advocate that P2P systems that gradually act as an important information infrastructure should be multi-disciplinary research topic, and reflect certain features of our society. So, from economic and social perspective, this paper designs the incentive-compatible reputation feedback scheme based on well-known economic model, and characterizes the social features of trust network in terms of efficiency and cost. Specifically, our framework has two distinctive purposes: first, from high-level perspective, we argue trust system is a special kind of social network, and an accurate characterization of the structural properties of the network can be of fundamental importance to understand the dynamics of the system. Thus, inspired by the concept of weighted small-world, this paper proposes new measurements to characterize the social properties of trust system, that is, high global and local efficiency, and low cost; then, from relative low-level perspective, we argue that reputation feedback is a special kind of information, and it is not free. So, based on economic model, VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Grove)-like reputation remuneration mechanism is proposed to stimulate rational peers not only to provide reputation feedback, but truthfully offer feedback. Furthermore, considering that trust and reputation is subjective, we classify the trust into functional trust and referral trust, and extend the referral trust to include two factors: similarity and truthfulness, which can efficiently reduce the trust inference error. The preliminary simulation results show the benefits of our proposal and the emergence of certain social properties in trust network.

A Trust Management Model Based on Bi-evaluation in P2P Networks

“…considered to be successful if both of the participants cooperate. A successful exchange rate is defined as the ratio of the number of successful exchanges over the total number of exchanges in a P2P network up to a certain time [9]. Specially, the successful exchanges rate of a trust model reflect its robustness, namely, the ability of the model to prevent malicious attacks.…”

“…Wang et al [9] designed the incentive-compatible trustworthiness feedback scheme based on well-known economic model, and characterized the social features of trust network in terms of efficiency and cost. Wang's model could combat the selfish and malicious peer behaviors, and could efficiently increase successful exchange rate.…”

“…The second one validates effect of BiTrust in terms of its suppressing selfish peers. Last, by comparing BiTrust with EigenTrust, Wang's model [9] and Random † , we analyze the successful exchanges rate of these models vary with the percentage of malicious peers.…”

Some trust issues in social networks and sensor networks

“…In relation to our works, Wang et al [28] discuss three orthogonal aspects pertaining to trust networks: (1) two ways of determining referral trust -one based on similarity and another based on truthfulness between agents; (2) characterization of small world networks; and (3) approaches to encourage/remunerate agents to share recommendations and ratings.…”

CellTrust: a reputation model for C2C commerce

“…An incentive for the development of new reputation models has been given by the diffusion of P2P networks and by the consequent need of reliability, in particular with respect to files and Web Service sharing [24,31,57]. Many works have studied such environments and proposed a mix of different techniques.…”