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

Trust is a fundamental element of any social network. However, despite numerous studies on trust, few have conducted studies across disciplines to provide a complete picture of the different dimensions of trustworthiness, such as integrity, competence and benevolence. In this paper, we focus on two of these dimensions, competence and benevolence. We propose techniques to evaluate the competence of the trustee in specific situations and infer the benevolence of the tustee towards the trustor when the trust evaluation is made. Moreover, we evaluate both competence and benevolence on the perceived trustworthiness of the trustee, taking into consideration the development of the relationship between the trustor and the trustee over time. We identified different stages in this relationship development and use them to evaluate trustworthiness of trustee in the absence of evidence that could be used to evaluate trustworthiness. Finally, we set an experimental scenario implemented as an agent-based model to evaluate our approach. The results obtained from these experiments show that the proposed techniques can improve the reliability of the estimation of the trustworthiness of the agents.