Trust and Business Webs

Abstract

A business web is a collection of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer need. A model that shows the creation, distribution, and consumption of goods or services of economic value in a business web is called value model. The goal of a value model is to help the stakeholders build a shared understanding of the business case and assess the potential profitability of collaboration in the business web. The participating stakeholders in a business web are assumed to act trustfully in the collaboration and therefore trust is left entirely outside the picture. However the assumption that stakeholders act trustfully is often not useful in practice (since there are malicious actors). In this paper we consider business webs from a trust perspective and introduce an approach for measuring the trustworthiness of the stakeholders participating in a business web.