TRUST AND REPUTATION FOR E-BUSINESS

Frank Dignum
Utrecht University
The Netherlands

Abstract
For any transaction to take place in business the partners must have trust in each other. The trust that the other party will deliver what it promises, that the product is of the right quality, that the money arrives in time etc. In classical business settings this trust is gained through the context in which the transaction takes place. Often the partners meet physically and can check the products and creditworthiness of the partner. Also the parties use trusted organizations to find another party, check the background of the other party, etc.
In electronic commerce many of these elements from the context of a business transaction that inspire trust disappeared. In this presentation we will discuss how we can inspire trust between parties in the context of electronic transactions. One of the main tools will be the use of reputation mechanisms that can be created and used in a variety of ways.

Biography
Frank Dignum (dignum@cs.uu.nl) got his Ph.D. in 1989 from the Free University of Amsterdam. After this he set up the Computer Science department of the University of Swaziland. After one year in the AI department of the Technical University of Lisbon he has worked at the Eindhoven University of Technology until September 2000. In Eindhoven he initiated an e-commerce research programme ("Enabling e-commerce") and also initiated an Esprit project (MeMo) that is geared to support SME's on electronic marketplaces. Since September 2000 he is an associate professor at the Utrecht University. His main research interests lay in the area of formal models of communication and social relations. The use of several modal logics is of prime importance in this research. The results are applied in the area of electronic commerce and multi-agent systems.