Quantifying Social Influence in Epinions

Abstract

In many eCommerce websites and consumer review websites, users can review products they purchased as well as the reviews others wrote. Users can also rate each other as trusted or untrusted relationships. By studying a data set from Epinions, we examine and quantify the correlation between trust/distrust relationships among the users and their ratings of the reviews. We discover that there is a strong alignment between the opinions of one's friends and his/her ratings. Our findings also suggest that there is a strong alignment between the collective opinion of a user's friends and the formation of his/her future relationships.