Research on propagation of trust and distrust by means of co-citation

The prosperous development of the customer to customer business has made trust and distrust salient. In this background, a key question is how trust and distrust propagate themselves among people who do not have previous interactions with each other, yet little research has been conducted towards this ending. Therefore, this paper attempts to fill the research gap by studying the propagation of trust and distrust. This study proposes co-citation as an appropriate means of propagation, constructs a belief matrix relating trust and distrust, and designs an algorithm by which an experiment is conducted. The results show that trust and distrust are in two distinct dimensions, co-citation is appropriate for propagating trust and distrust, and distrust is useful to make trust propagated more accurately and efficiently.