Trust Me, I´m an Expert: Trust, Homophily and Expertise in MMOs

Trust is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social networks and people trust one another for a variety of reasons. In this paper we study the problem of trust in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) with respect to homophily and expertise. We prose a topology of homophily in MMOs based on the literature on homophily and domain knowledge of MMOs. Our results show that while there is some mapping between homophily in MMOs and the theories of homophily in the offline world, the mapping is not complete. Only ascribed homophily and value homophily is observed in the trust network, while other types of homophilies are conspicuously absent. We observed that the trust network exhibits many properties which are not observed in most other social networks. Based on our observations we propose a generative model for trust networks in MMOs.