Computational trust management, QAD, and its applications

Abstract

Trust is an important factor for successful e-commerce and e-media applications. However, these media inherently disable many ordinary communication channels and means, and affect trust forming factors. Therefore cyber environment requires additional support when it comes to trust. This is also one key reason why computational trust management methods are being developed now for some fifteen years, while another key reason is to enable better decision making through mathematical modeling and simulations in other areas. These methods are grounded on certain premises, which are analyzed in this paper. On this basis, Qualitative assessment dynamics (QAD for short) is presented that complements the above methods. As opposed to other methods, it is aligned with certain principles of human reasoning. Therefore it further extends the scope of other computational trust management technologies that are typically concerned with artificial ways of reasoning, while QAD gives a basis also for applications in ordinary environments where humans are involved. By using this methodology, experimental work will be presented, applied to the area of organizations and human factor management.