1Trust Evaluation for Reliable Electronic Transactions Between Business Partners

Summary. In the digital economy era, commercial relationships between business partners are increasing in flexibility, and business binds tend to be created when-ever a business opportunity arises. Moreover, the instability in demand increases the need for enterprises to procure new partners and the associate risk of deal-ing with partners that might be unknown beforehand. Therefore, enterprises need mechanisms that allow to evaluate the confidence they have on their current and possibly new (unknown) partners, and to monitor this confidence in a continuous and automatic way. This paper presents our computational trust model, which is inspired in the concept of the hysteresis of trust and betrayal and on the asymmetry principle of human psychology. This model allows to estimate the trustworthiness of agents using different features of the dynamics of trust. Additionally, we present a study on the effect of preselecting partners based on their trustworthiness in au-tomated negotiation processes. The study was conducted experimentally using our agent-based Electronic Institution framework for e-Contracting, which includes a normative environment and an automatic negotiation service, as well as the men-tioned computational trust service. The results obtained show that in identified conditions business clients benefit for preselecting partners based on trust prior to the negotiation phase