Social Trust: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

As it was been written in the call of the original workshop “In recent research on electronic commerce” trust has been recognized as one of the key factors for successful electronic commerce adoption. In electronic commerce problems of trust are magnified, because agents reach out far beyond their familiar trade environments. Also it is far from obvious whether existing paper-based techniques for fraud detection and prevention are adequate to establish trust in an electronic network environment where you usually never meet your trade partner face to face, and where messages can be read or copied a million times without leaving any trace. With the growing impact of electronic commerce distance trust building becomes more and more important, and better models of trust and deception are needed. One trend is that in electronic communication channels extra agents, the so called Trusted Third Parties, are introduced in an agent community that take care of trust building among the other agents in the network. But in fact different kind of trust are needed and should be modelled and supported:

• trust in the environment and in the infrastructure (the socio-technical system);

• trust in your agent and in mediating agents;

• trust in the potential partners;

• trust in the warrantors and authorities (if any).