Community gravity: measuring bidirectional effects by trust and rating on online social networks

Several attempts have been made to analyze customer behavior on online E-commerce sites. Some studies particularly emphasize the social networks of customers. Users' reviews and ratings of a product exert effects on other consumers' purchasing behavior. Whether a user refers to other users' ratings depends on the trust accorded by a user to the reviewer. On the other hand, the trust that is felt by a user for another user correlates with the similarity of two users' ratings. This bidirectional interaction that involves trust and rating is an important aspect of understanding consumer behavior in online communities because it suggests clustering of similar users and the evolution of strong communities. This paper presents a theoretical model along with analyses of an actual online E-commerce site. We analyzed a large community site in Japan: @cosme. The noteworthy characteristics of @cosme are that users can bookmark their trusted users; in addition, they can post t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Yutaka Matsuo, Hikaru Yamamoto
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Online Social Networks, Product Exert Effects, Similar Users, WWW 2009