TrustCV: Reputation-based trust for collectivist digital business ecosystems

This research proposes a trust and reputation model to support collectivist digital business ecosystems for regions such as Africa, where collectivist culture norms and behaviours are common. As trusting behaviour is strongly influenced by cultural norms and beliefs, trust should not only be considered from a technical perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. A multi-level group trust and reputation model is proposed to support group harmony using social network metrics. The implementation of the model ensures that collectivist communities are more comfortable when transacting with each other, thereby improving economic performance. The performance of Trustcv is measured through multi-agent simulations, giving interesting results when compared to simulations of existing trust models. The results indicate that Trustcv can successfully be used to support trust in collectivist digital business ecosystems.