Modelling Electronic Trust using Bayesian Networks

Abstract

This paper discusses importance of trust in the context of digital economy. Even though electronic commerce continues to grow worldwide due to many of its advantages, it has not been fully adopted yet. The reason for some barriers in adopting e-commerce lies in potential customers who still perceive online setting as quite risky. Customers who have concerns related to sellers’ IT infrastructure resilience, and secured and safe personal data, will hardly ever engage in e-transactions. The nature of trust is very subjective, complex and multi-faceted. Trust issues are not present only between buyers and sellers, but also between suppliers and sellers, trust in recommendations and references on certain products, etc. In this paper authors propose modelling trust using Bayesian networks and provide an illustrative example which is typical in online transactions.