Reasoning about the Role of Information Systems in Trusting Decisions

The interest in the study of trust has grown steadily since 1990 in a wide range of scholarly disciplines. The science of information systems is no exception, since the concepts of information and trust are inseparably intermingled. Meanwhile, there exist numerous applications of trust – most commonly in the areas of security and content filtering many of which have already successfully been tested in real-world environments. However, with some exceptions, relatively little has been done in laying the conceptual foundations for discussing the relationship between information systems and trust. In this paper we argue that especially in environments, characterized through low presence of institutional mechanisms, availability of information is an important factor in facilitating trusting decisions. Starting from the observations of the confidence building through information in the real world, we identify and classify the potentials of information systems in facilitating trusting decision in virtual environments such as the Internet.