A Computational Trust Model for E-Commerce Systems

Today, one of the most important factors of successful e-commerce is creating trust and security. Undoubtedly, in absence of trust as a key element of online business communications, e-commerce will face a lot of challenges. Assessing trust, especially in the beginning of a commercial relation and generally, formulizing the trust is a complex and difficult task. Trust may not be defined in a special framework even for customers and e-vendors. The reason is that for giving a definition for trust, different people, based on their cultural and familial background, believe in different features and dimensions in their mind. In the model proposed for computing trust in e-commerce, first of all based on past research three general fields are envisaged. Then, a computational model has been presented for evaluating trust. Finally a case study is presented to illustrate the proposed trust evaluation model. Future works are also discussed in addition.