Alberto Fernandes, Evangelos Kotsovinos, Sven Östring, Boris Dragovic. Pinocchio: Incentives for Honest Participation in Distributed Trust Management. In Christian Damsgaard Jensen, Stefan Poslad, Theodosis Dimitrakos, editors, Trust Management, Second International Conference, iTrust 2004, Oxford, UK, March 29 - April 1, 2004, Proceedings. Volume 2995 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 63-77, Springer, 2004. [doi]
In this paper, we introduce a framework for providing incentives for honest participation in global-scale distributed trust management infrastructures. Our system can improve the quality of information supplied by these systems by reducing free-riding and encouraging honesty. Our approach is twofold: (1) we provide rewards for participants that advertise their experiences to others, and (2) impose the credible threat of halting the rewards, for a substantial amount of time, for participants who consistently provide suspicious feedback. For this purpose we develop an honesty metric which can indicate the accuracy of feedback.