A Framework of Two Tiers to Enhance Trust in Recommender Systems

Online recommender systems use the information provided by the community, explicitly or implicitly, to generate and present recommendations on various items, locations, organizations and people. These systems use the bidirectional capabilities of the internet to collect opinions and present feedback in multiple techniques. Though the ability to share judgments across a huge community of users is fostered, these systems have their own weaknesses such as a low ratio of participation and a relative inability to elicit truthful, reliable and effective recommendations. Trust is the belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something. The processes of trust building are actually the processes of forming the expectations. Issues of trust, reputation and recommendations have become important topics of research in many fields but especially in electronic commerce where buyers and sellers rarely know each other. The use of reputation and recommendation mechanisms may decrease the uncertainties but sometimes fail to be trusted.