Improving the efficiency of collaborative work with trust management

Abstract

The concept of trust has recently been introduced in the context of peer-to-peer networks, in order to deal with uncertainty regarding the behavior of imperfectly known agents. In this paper, we apply the notion of trust to situations of collaborative work, more precisely of document editing. We suggest to use trust to compute a satisfaction score for each participant, in order to help select the successive editors of the document so as to avoid unnecessary readings by all collaborators after each modification. We assume that the document development process ends when all collaborators are satisfied with the quality of the document. Two mechanisms using trust to improve that process are proposed, and compared to the situation without trust. Extensive simulations suggest that trust can improve the efficiency of the collaborative work, while it can be implemented in a distributed manner.