Identifying the Role of Common Interests in Online User Trust Formation

Abstract

Despite enormous recent efforts in detecting the mechanism of the social relation formation in online social systems, the underlying rules between the common interests and social relations are still under dispute. Do online users befriend others who have similar tastes, or do their tastes become more similar after they become friends? In this paper, we investigate the correlation between online user trust formation and their common interests, measured by the overlap rate ρ and taste similarity θ respectively. The trust relation creation time is set as the zero timestamp. The statistical results before and after the trust formation for an online network, namely Epinions, show that, the overlap rate ρ increases greatly before the trust formation, while it would increase smoothly after the creation of the trust relation. Comparing with the empirical results, two null models are presented by shuffling the temporal behaviors of online users, which suggests that the accumulation of the common interests can result in the trust formation. Furthermore, we investigate the taste similarity θ of the common interests, which can reflect the users’ preference on their common interests. The empirical results show that the taste similarity θ is rapidly increased around the day when users trust the others. That is, the similar tastes on the common interests among users lead to the trust formation. Finally, we report that the user degree can also influence the effect of the taste similarity θ on user trust formation. This work may shed some light for deeply understanding the evolution mechanism of the online social systems.

Popularity and user diversity of online objects

“…In addition, we have not investigated the constitution of the types of users who select the objects with specific degree, which is a still an open question. Furthermore, it is important to verdict whether the information entropy could be considered in the recommender algorithms [30][31][32][33].…”

Do reviews from friends and the crowd affect online consumer posting behaviour differently?

“…Individuals are always engage in group life and the interactions between friends are more frequent than that of crowds. Thus, it it very common that people behave similar to their friends (Lewis et al, 2012;Ji et al, 2015). Yet, different friends may have different impact over a specific consumer.…”

“…As we discussed in section 3.1, a large volume of the crowd review may suggest that the business is of common interest for most of consumers, while the volume of friend review can indicate the interest of the target consumer's local social group. Since friends normally have similar interests, tastes and so on (Ji et al, 2015;Pan et al, 2017;Leskovec et al, 2007), a consumer is more likely to select these businesses of his/her friends' interests (high volume of friend reviews), rather than those of common interests (high volume of crowd reviews). A higher chance of getting consumed will lead to higher possibility of being reviewed.…”

Uncovering the popularity mechanisms for Facebook applications

“…Furthermore, Ni and Wang et al [26,27] found that small-degree users tend to select popular movies, while large-degree users prefer to select the unpopular ones. The heterogeneous physics of the object popularity plays an important role for the online social systems evolution [28,29]. As shown in Fig.…”