A Survey on True-reputation Algorithm for Trustworthy Online Rating System

The average of customer ratings on a product, which we call a reputation, is one of the key factors in online shoping. The common way for customers to express their satisfaction level with their purchases is through online ratings. The overall buyer?s satisfaction is quantified as the aggregated score of all ratings and is available to all buyers. This average score and reputation of a product acts as a guide for online buyers and highly influences consumer?s final purchase decisions. The trustworthiness of a reputation can be achieved when a large number of buyers involved in ratings with honesty. If some users wantedly give unfair ratings to a item, especially when few users have participated, the reputation of the product could easily be modified. In order to improve the trustworthiness of the products in e-commerce sites a new model is proposed with a true - reputation algorithm that repeatedly adjusts the reputation based on the confidence of the user ratings

Psychological elements explaining the consumer's adoption and use of a website recommendation system: A theoretical framework proposal

The purpose of this paper is to understand, with an emphasis on the psychological perspective of the research problem, the consumer's adoption and use of a certain web site recommendation system as well as the main psychological outcomes involved. The approach takes the form of theoretical modelling. Findings: A conceptual model is proposed and discussed. A total of 20 research propositions are theoretically analyzed and justified. Research limitations/implications: The theoretical discussion developed here is not empirically validated. This represents an opportunity for future research. Practical implications: The ideas extracted from the discussion of the conceptual model should be a help for recommendation systems designers and web site managers, so that they may be more aware, when working with such systems, of the psychological process consumers undergo when interacting with them. In this regard, numerous practical reflections and suggestions are presented

Incorporating Profit Margins into Recommender Systems: A Randomized Field Experiment of Purchasing Behavior and Consumer Trust

A number of recent studies have proposed new recommender designs that incorporate firm-centric measures (e.g., the profit margins of products) along with consumer-centric measures (e.g., relevance of recommended products). These designs seek to maximize the long-term profits from recommender deployment without compromising customer trust. However, very little is known about how consumers might respond to recommender algorithms that account for product profitability. We tested the impact of deploying a profit-based recommender on its precision and usage, as well as customer purchasing and trust, with data from an online randomized field experiment. We found that the profit-based algorithm, despite potential concerns about its negative impact on consumers, is effective in retaining consumers’ usage and purchase levels at the same rate as a content-based recommender. We also found that the profit-based algorithm generated higher profits for the firm. Further, to measure trust, we issued a post-experiment survey to participants in the experiment; we found there were no significant differences in trust across treatment. We related the survey results to the accuracy and diversity of recommendations and found that accuracy and diversity were both positively and significantly related to trust. The study has broader implications for firms using recommenders as a marketing tool, in that the approach successfully addresses the relevance-profit tradeoff in a real-world context

Trust beyond reputation: A computational trust model based on stereotypes

Models of computational trust support users in taking decisions. They are commonly used to guide users' judgements in online auction sites; or to determine quality of contributions in Web 2.0 sites. However, most existing systems require historical information about the past behavior of the specific agent being judged. In contrast, in real life, to anticipate and to predict a stranger's actions in absence of the knowledge of such behavioral history, we often use our "instinct"- essentially stereotypes developed from our past interactions with other "similar" persons. In this paper, we propose StereoTrust, a computational trust model inspired by stereotypes as used in real-life. A stereotype contains certain features of agents and an expected outcome of the transaction. When facing a stranger, an agent derives its trust by aggregating stereotypes matching the stranger's profile. Since stereotypes are formed locally, recommendations stem from the trustor's own personal experiences and perspective. Historical behavioral information, when available, can be used to refine the analysis. According to our experiments using Epinions.com dataset, StereoTrust compares favorably with existing trust models that use different kinds of information and more complete historical information

Crossing the Rubicon: A Generic Intelligent Advisor

Recommender systems (RS) are being used by an increasing number of e-commerce sites to help consumers find the personally best products. We define here the criteria that a RS should satisfy, drawing on concepts from behavioral science, computational intelligence, and data mining. We present our conclusions from building the WiseUncle RS and give its general description. Rather than being an advisor for a particular application, WiseUncle is a generic RS, a platform for generating application-specific advisors