Social Network Analysis to Construct Index of Trust in Virtual Community

• Main Authors: Mabel Liu, 劉麗萍
• Other Authors: Sy-Feng Wang
• Format: Others
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35774894121396732256

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 企業管理學系 === 92 === In the real world, people judges whether a person’s words are trustworthy by his/her past performance and behavior . However, the feature of anonymity in virtual world made this mechanism very weak. Thus, how to build up an index of trust for those effectively predicable members in virtual community is very important to E-commerce, website community and the members of virtual community without any doubts. The theory of embedding meso level thinking provides this study with a critical theoretical base and legitimacy. In other words, if the social capital such as trust is created and embedded in the relative structure of social network, then ideally, through the context of historical data extracted from social interactive network as provided by the virtual community, we can begin to create social network indices to more effectively predict the trust credibility for certain members or on certain topics. Both views from historical and theoretical approaches, this study gives us two social network indices and two contrasting hypothesis, and tries to verify the effectiveness of inspected indices and hypothesis through existing empirical data.