Trust as an Organismic Trait of E-Commerce Systems

The behavior patterns resulting from the interactions of many trusting entities in e-commerce systems are often more complex than the performance of each of the individuals separately; thus, simple rules of trusting behavior give rise to complex, emergent patterns. A major reason these emergent properties were neither successfully captured nor adequately treated by the current formal models is the global trend of addressing technical issues in a mechanistic manner – considering the system merely as a sum of its components and neglecting the interactions between those components. This work introduces the concept of an organismic property of human-centric e-commerce systems and reveals new areas of applicability of trust as an organismic system-trait. We find that the current schemes of modeling trust in e-commerce systems disregard the role of diversity, complexity, and a service provider’s responsibility, concentrating mainly on the relationship among the service consumers. The higher purpose, however, is to provide a novel view of analyzing trust-related design-issues, and to give notice of the possible consequences from a systemic ignorance of these issues in e-commerce systems.