Generating trust-based recommendations for social networks organized by groups

Evidence suggests that people often waver to buy from online vendors because of uncertainty about vendor behavior or the risk of having wrong information about the products. Trust plays a central role in helping consumers overcome perceptions of risk. Moreover, thematic groups are gaining a lot of attention and high centrality in online community, as users share opinions and/or mutually collaborate for reaching their targets. The users can be helped by personal software agents able to perform activities aimed at supporting the purchase of products. This paper proposes a new trust measure in social networks organized by groups. In particular, we present a model to represent this scenario, and we introduce an algorithm for detecting trust recommendations in virtual communities in presence of groups. We technically formalize our idea and show a complete example of how our approach works.