Abstract
We discuss the trust of consumers regarding products and information sources. Today, securing the trust of consumers is a major issue. We verify the effect that the trust of an information source has on the trust of the products it describes. Furthermore, we verify the interdependence involved in trusting in different information sources. We propose a "trust network hypothesis" and use a network autocorrelation model to statically verify it. The result of this statistical investigation showed that trust in a product and trust in an information source describing it depend on each other. Especially, we found that trust in friends and acquaintances as an information source about food is important for developing trust for various information sources and trust in producers and retailers is important for developing the trust of the products.
