TrustMe 1.0 Manual

TrustMe 1.0 Manual
Author(s): Prietula, Michael J.
Year: 2006
Paper Number: GBS-DIA-2006-002
Goizueta Department: Decision and Information Analysis

Abstract

This is a manual to accompany the pedagogical software, TrustMe 1.0: A Social Simulation of Trust, Advice and Gossip. Underlying this simulation is a simple model of what we call TAG models of social interactions. TAG models of social interaction are those that involve information dissemination within the context of task performance (advice), information dissemination regarding agent behavior with respect to advice (gossip), and submodels of believability of information from those dissemination sources (trust) - Trust, Advice, and Gossip. The clearest examples of such models arise in chat-rooms and posting architectures of various forms and functions, such as those found associated with organizations in eBay or Amazon; those arising as independent sources of collective opinion, such as Epinions; a wide array of professional advice forums, such as codeguru or javaworld; and the immense spectrum of IRC-based chatrooms, ranging from the mundane to nefarious exchanges for hacking information, malware, warez or identities. TrustMe software is useful in discussing and exploring this simple model, but also in using TrustMe as a data generator for learning about social network analysis metrics and software, as it generates files readable for both Steve Borgattis UCINET and Cyrams Netminer.