Trust Modeling for Networked Organizations Using Reputation and Collaboration Estimates

Abstract—The main motivation for organizations and individuals to col-laborate is to enable knowledge and resource sharing in order to effectively fulfill a joint business opportunity. This correspondence focuses on virtual organizations (VOs) and virtual teams (VTs), whose strengths lie in the range of competencies of their members, offered jointly through collabora-tion. One of the difficulties in VO and VT creation is partner selection using partners ’ mutual trust as one of the selection criteria. This correspondence provides an analysis of trust relationships based on the principal–agent theory, and proposes an approach to hierarchical multiattribute decision-support-based trust estimation applied to a network of collaborating or-ganizations (VO) and a network of collaborating individuals (VT). The correspondence presents two case studies, one using a questionnaire-based approach and the other using automated reputation and collaboration es-timation from data gathered by Web crawling. Index Terms—Decision support systems, modeling, networks, visualization