Supporting users' trust decisions on inter-enterprice collaborations

Abstract

The thesis addresses the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations, which are particularly useful for small and medium-sized enterprises for attaining competitive edge in fields dominated by large enterprises.

Trust decision making regarding joining and continuing the collaboration is an important element of trust management. Inter-enterprise collaborations have trust management systems performing automated trust decision making. However, automated trust decision making is possible only in routine cases while human intervention is required for other cases. Human intervention for trust decision making is an open research question in the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations.

To resolve the problem of human intervention in context to inter-enterprise collaborations, literature on trust, trust decision making and development and human behavioural strategies is explored. Based on the literature review, a trust relationship development model is proposed. To evaluate the validity of the proposed model, the thesis applies it to compare three existing trust management systems: TrustCoM, ECOLEAD and Pilarcos.

The thesis focuses on supporting human intervention in the existing Pilarcos trust management system. The proposed trust relationship development model, Nielsen's guidelines and cognitive theories for designing user interfaces are used for designing and implementing a trust decision expert tool. The trust decision expert tool is evaluated on four dimensions: information sufficiency, usability, user performance and quality.

The master thesis contributes to the existing knowledge by providing guidelines for designing and implementing trust decision expert tools handling human intervention in the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations. The proposed trust decision expert tool provides a basis for developing similar expert tool for other trust management systems.