Thimo Schulze

Trustworthiness in Networks: A Simulation Approach for Approximating Local Trust and Distrust Values

Trust is essential for most social and business networks in the web, and determining local trust values between two unfamiliar users is an important issue. However, many existing approaches to calculating these values have limitations in various constellations or network characteristics. We therefore propose an approach that interprets trust as probability and is able to estimate local trust values on large networks using a Monte Carlo simulation method. The estimation is based on existing indirect trust statements between two unfamiliar users. This approach is then extended to the SimTrust algorithm that incorporates both trust and distrust values. It is implemented and discussed in detail with examples. Our main contribution is a new approach which incorporates all available trust and distrust information in such a way that basic trust properties are satisfied.

How increased social presence through co-browsing influences user engagement in collaborative online shopping

Co-browsing enables sharing same view in a browser in real time.We test co-browsing versus traditional chat browsing.Our online experiment shows co-browsing increased presence and engagement.Traditional chat browsing yielded worse experience perceptions.Online retailers thus should consider co-browsing for co-shopping. Traditional online shopping has been a solitary activity, but technology advances are challenging this norm. Collaborative online shopping (i.e., co-shopping) stimulates more purchases than solo shopping does, and it embraces the innate human need to socialize. Thus, it represents a growing form of ecommerce and therefore draws increasing interest from researchers and practitioners. The most recent advancement in co-shopping is the emergence of social co-browsing that enables two or more users to share the same view in a browser in real time. Most existing studies on co-shopping have focused on factors that influence purchasing online, but they have not considered co-browsing. In this paper, we use social presence and engagement theories to explain the roles of co-presence and engagement in increasing endurability for co-shoppers. We tested our model with a free-simulation experiment on 234 consumers on Mechanical Turk, randomized to three conditions of co-presence. Their task involved co-browsing (except for the control condition) on an e-commerce website to shop for Apple products. To invoke the co-browsing IT artifacts, we used Synchronite as a backend to create a queue in which participants were paired in dyads. According to our results, users who perceived greater psychological presence of another shopper were significantly more engaged in the online shopping activity. In particular, co-presence in co-browsing fostered a more rewarding experience than in the chat-only condition. Finally, we outline our contributions to research and practice and discuss the limitations of this work that open up new research opportunities.