This evolution has several implications for security models, policies and mechanisms needed to protect users’ information and resources in an increasingly interconnected computing infrastructure.
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, use methods such as proof of work (PoW) to achieve computational trust inside the transaction network.
The expected benefits, according to Marsh et al., result in the use of others' ability through delegation, and in increased cooperation in an open and less protected environment.
Research in the area of computational mechanisms for trust and reputation in virtual societies is directed towards increased reliability and performance of digital communities.
Finally, the trust decision is taken by considering the computed values and exogenous factors, like disposition or risk assessments.
These systems are used by intelligent software agents as an incentive in decision-making, when deciding whether or not to honor contracts, and as a mechanism to search trustworthy exchange partners.
[7] Several definitions of the human notion of trust have been proposed during the last years in different domains from sociology, psychology to political and business science.
For example, Romano's recent definition[8] tries to encompass the previous work in all these domains: Trust is a subjective assessment of another’s influence in terms of the extent of one’s perception about the quality and significance of another’s impact over one’s outcomes in a given situation, such that one’s expectation of, openness to, and inclination toward such influence provide a sense of control over the potential outcomes of the situation.Trust and reputation both have a social value.
A lot of proposals have appeared in the literature and here a selection of computational trust and reputation models, that represent a good sample of the current research, is presented.
In addition, based on Hebbian learning (for the strength of the connections to the emotional responses) different adaptation processes are introduced, which are inspired by the Somatic Marker Hypothesis.
[18] As most people today use the word, prejudice refers to a negative or hostile attitude towards another social group, often racially defined.
Most of the literature in cognitive and social sciences claims that humans exhibit non-rational, biased behavior with respect to trust.
In e-markets, sociological information is almost non-existent and, in order to increase the efficiency of actual trust and reputation models, it should be considered.
The aggregation of more trust and reputation evidence is useful in a computational model but it can increase its complexity making a general solution difficult.
Nowadays, game theory is the predominant paradigm considered to design computational trust and reputation models.
Game theoretical models produce good results but may not be appropriate when the complexity of the agents, in terms of social relations and interaction increases, becomes too restrictive.
In [28] the authors investigated the problem of trust transferability in open distributed environments, proposing a translation mechanism able to make information exchanged from one agent to another more accurate and useful.