A fuzzy trust model for e-commerce

Abstract

It is argued that e-commerce has not reached its full potential and trust was often cited as the main reason why many customers are still skeptical about some online vendors. Many trust models have been developed, but most are subjective and did not take into account the vagueness and ambiguity of the domain and the specificity of customers. We have developed a model that attempts to identify the information customers expect to find on a vendors website to increase their trust and hence the likelihood of a transaction to take place. In this paper, we present a method based on fuzzy logic to evaluate trust in e-commerce. We argue that fuzzy logic is suitable for trust evaluation as it takes into account the uncertainties within e-commerce data and like human relationships, trust is often expressed by linguistics terms rather then numerical values. We validated the system using two case studies.