Composite Trust Model for an Information Sharing Scenario

Effective decision-making within teams and organizations require members to quickly identify, process, and share information with each other. Trust has received significant attention as a key concept to improve performance of information sharing tasks and teams. In this paper, we study the impact of a composite trust based agent model on information sharing in organizations. Our proposed composite trust captures the impact of a multi-genre network that such tasks are carried on (i.e., cognitive/social and communication networks). Our trust model and simulation experiments enable us to study the impact of team composition (i.e., composition and characteristics of individuals) and network connectivity (i.e., ability to communicate with neighboring nodes) on overall performance in terms of shared situation awareness (SA) and efficiency of communication. Our results show that trust-based information filtering and sharing strategy effectively guides entities to efficiently achieve high SA.