Formalizing Trust-based Decision Making in Electronic Commerce Transactions

Trust is the cornerstone of traditional business transactions and a lack of trust is one of the main inhibitors on the future growth of Electronic Commerce. However, trust is a nebulous social construct that is further complicated by its context dependence. Our assertion is that through study of the contextual artifacts and the process of trust formation in traditional business settings, we can devise a logic-based model that adequately captures the constructs needed to enable the automated creation of trusted Electronic Commerce transactions. In this paper, we introduce a model, called E2T2, which enables the creation of trust-based relationships between online merchants and their consumers.