Evaluating e-commerce trust using fuzzy logic

Trust is widely recognized as an essential factor for the continual development of business-to-customer electronic commerce. Many trust models have been developed, however, and most are subjective and do not take into account the vagueness and ambiguity of EC trust and the customer’s intuitions and experience when conducting online transactions. In this chapter, the authors develop a fuzzy trust 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 is shown to increase customers trust towards online merchants. Fuzzy logic, the authors argue is suitable for trust evaluation as it takes into account the uncertainties within e-commerce data and like human relationships; it is often expressed by linguistics terms rather than numerical values