Trust Evaluation for Reliable Electronic Transactions between Business Partners

摘要

In this era of digital economy, commercial relationships between business partners are increasing in flexibility, with new business binds being created whenever a business opportunity arises. Moreover, the instability in demand increases the need for enterprises to procure new partners as well as the associated risk of dealing with partners that may be unknown beforehand. Therefore, enterprises need mechanisms that allow to evaluate the confidence they have on their current and potential new, unknown, partners, and to monitor this confidence in a continuous and automatic way. This paper presents our computational trust model, which was inspired in the concept of the hysteresis of trust and betrayal and in the asymmetry principle of human psychology. Our model allows to estimate the trustworthiness of agents using different features of the dynamics of trust. Additionally, we present a study on the effect of preselecting partners based on their trustworthiness in automated negotiation processes. The study was conducted experimentally using our agent-based Electronic Institution framework for e-Contracting, which includes a normative environment and an automatic negotiation service, as well as the mentioned computational trust service. The results obtained show that, in identified conditions, business clients benefit from preselecting partners based on trust prior to the negotiation phase.