The Impact of Benevolence in Computational Trust

Abstract

Abstract.Trust is a construct of paramount importance in society. Accordingly, computational trust is evolving fast in order to allow trust in artificial societies. Despite the advances in this research field, most computational trust approaches evaluate trust by estimating the trustworthiness of the agents under evaluation (the trustees), without however distinguishing between the different dimensions of trustworthiness, such as ability and benevolence. In this paper, we propose different techniques to extract the ability of the trustee in the task at hand and to infer the benevolence of the trustee toward the truster when the trust judgment is made. Moreover, we propose to dynamically change the relative importance and impact of both ability and benevolence on the perceived trustworthiness of the trustee, taking into consideration the development of the relationship between the truster and the trustee and the disposition of the truster in the specific situation. Finally, we set an experimental scenario to evaluate our approach. The results obtained from these experiments show that the proposed techniques significantly improve the reliability of the estimation of the trustworthiness of agents.

The Impact of Competence and Benevolence in a Computational Model of Trust

“…Moreover, it requires explicit information about the competence and disposition (or similar beliefs) of the agent under evaluation, which may be hard to get in dynamic agent-based environments. Another social trust model was presented by Urbano et al [7] called situationaware and social computational trust Model (SOLUM). Their computational model consists of two parts: the first part is a general framework of computational trust, which is based on two fundamental characteristics of trust, the trustor's disposition and emotional state.…”

“…Our aim is to define a mechanism for estimating trustworthiness of a trustee that can be used by the trustor to evaluate trust and make decisions about the future relationship with the trustee. Extracting trustworthiness of trustee based on Mayer et al's model [3] has been only implemented by few scholars such as [7]. Most of these computational trust approaches estimate the trustees' trustworthiness using individual items of evidence about these trustees' behavior in the past interactions, either with the trustor or with third party agents [8][9][10].…”

“…In order to characterize and describe the situation leading to an agreement, we consider the definition of context as including four main types of context: identity, time, location, and activity [11]. Urbano et al [7] identified eight dimensions of context ize the type of the task, its complexity, deadline, and outcome of its realization, respectively. We adapt the Urbano et al [7] context definition in this paper.…”

“…Urbano et al [7] identified eight dimensions of context ize the type of the task, its complexity, deadline, and outcome of its realization, respectively. We adapt the Urbano et al [7] context definition in this paper. For the simplicity, we assume that all agreements performed in the society of agents refer to the same type of task t (d 5 ), although tasks have different degrees of complexity (d 6 ) and deadlines (d 7 ).…”

The Role of Trustworthiness in Achieving Customers’ Loyalty in Tourism and Hotel Sectors

“…Benevolence is considered as a basic factor of any relationship; it includes caring, support, good and kind behavior, it can be explained as the extent of doing well by an organization towards its customers without any intention of harming them, regardless of the profit motivation (Mayer et al, 1995;Skard, 2017). Benevolence is an attribute of goodwill; for example caring, supporting, and helping customers can make them believe that a tourist company or hotel is competent, likable, and trustworthy (Urbano et al, 2013 and;Lee and Liang, 2016). Benevolence is regarded also as the positive actions of tourist companies and hotels for the benefit of their customers regardless of their benefit, which means putting their customers' best interest first (Sirdeshmukh et al, 2002).…”