Using a Trust Model in Decision Making for Supply Chain Management

One of the critical factors for a successful cooperative relationship in a supply chain partnership is trust. Many real-world applications, such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), can be modeled using multi-agent systems. One shortcoming of current SCM models is that their trust models are ad hoc and do not have a strong theoretical basis. As a result, they are unable to model subtleties in agent behavior that can be used to build a more accurate trust model. We propose a trust model for SCM that is grounded in probabilistic game theory. In this model, trust can be gained through direct interactions and/or by asking for information from other trustworthy agents. We will use this model to simulate and study supply chain market behavior.