Trust Model for Virtual Organizations

Abstract

in human society, trust plays an important role -- it is the main factor behind most decisions. Within an organization, both real and virtual, a series of decisions on personnel management flow are made. The paper proposes a trust model of agents in a virtual organization, which can be used to decide whether it is better to start, continue, or stop working with the evaluated agent. The trust factor of an agent is summarized as a unique value based on a function which properly aggregates the agent's characteristics and the available information on agent's performance. The proposed model has the advantage of assuring simple calculations and providing an overview of the evaluated agent's performance.