Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter III
A Decision Support System for
Trust Formalization
Farid Meziane
University of Salford, UK
Samia Nefti
University of Salford, UK
aBstract
Trust is widely recognized as an essential factor for the continual development of business-to-customer
(B2C) electronic commerce (EC). Many trust models have been developed, however, most are subjec-
tive and do not take into account the vagueness and ambiguity of EC trust and the customers' intuitions
and experience when conducting online transactions. In this chapter, we describe the development and
implementation of a model using fuzzy reasoning to evaluate EC trust. This trust model is based on the
information customers expect to find on an EC Web site and that is shown from many studies to increase
customers trust towards online merchants. We argue that fuzzy logic is suitable for trust evaluation as it
takes into account the uncertainties within EC data and like human relationships; it is often expressed
by linguistic terms rather then numerical values. The evaluation of the proposed model is illustrated
using four case studies and a comparison with two other models is conducted to emphasise the benefits
of using fuzzy decision system.
introduction
Business to consumer (B2C) electronic commerce (EC) has seen a phenomenal growth since the de-
velopment of the Internet, and there is a growing interest from many organizations to use it as a way to
improve their competitiveness and reach a wider customer base. According to eMarketer, the total business
of B2C EC has increased from $30 billions in 2002 to $90.1 billions in 2003 and continued increasing
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