Trust analysis and assessment in virtual organization breeding environments

Establishing trust relationships among the member organizations in a virtual organization breeding environment (VBE) is a pre-condition for their smooth cooperation. Furthermore, considering that effective creation of virtual organizations (VOs) is the main aim of the VBEs, the measurement of an organization's trust level facilitates the selection of partners for configuration and establishment of VOs. While in a small-size VBE e.g. with 20 to 40 members, organizations may have a good chance to get to know each other, and can therefore have a subjective (opinion-based) judgment of the trust level of others, in medium and large-size VBEs, trust analysis of other organizations is a main obstacle for VO creation and a big challenge. Design and development of an objective (fact-based) approach for assessing the trust level and establishing trust relationships among organizations is of particular importance for large and very large VBEs, where usually their member organizations may not even be totally known to each other. This paper addresses an objective trust analysis approach for the VBEs. It identifies and describes trust elements that are necessary for measuring and assessing the trust level of different organizations. The paper addresses trust in VBEs through defining: the hierarchy of trust elements, the impacts of various values of trust criteria on the trust levels, and the causal influences among different trust criteria. It also identifies and addresses three main VBE trust objectives, namely for creating the trust: (1) among VBE member organizations, (2) between the member organizations and the VBE administration, and (3) between the external stakeholders (e.g. the customer) and the VBE establishment. It then presents an approach to assess the trust level of member organizations. For the paper, the perishable product market is used to exemplify different aspects of trust. Besides the VBE environments, the approaches for modelling, analysis, and assessment of trust that are discussed in this paper are entirely, or at least for the most part, directly applicable to other forms of collaborative networked organizations, such as the VOs.