An Extended Framework for Recovering From Trust Breakdowns in Online Community Settings

The violation of trust as a result of interactions that do not proceed as expected gives rise to the question as to whether broken trust can possibly be recovered. Clearly, trust recovery is more complex than trust initialization and maintenance. Trust recovery requires a more complex mechanism to explore different factors that cause the decline of trust and identify the affected individuals of trust violation both directly and indirectly. In this study, an extended framework for recovering trust is presented. Aside from evaluating whether there is potential for recovery based on the outcome of a forgiveness mechanism after a trust violation, encouraging cooperation between interacting parties after a trust violation through incentive mechanisms is also important. Furthermore, a number of experiments are conducted to validate the applicability of the framework and the findings show that the e-marketplace incorporating our proposed framework results in improved efficiency of trading, especially in long-term interactions.