Puneet Kaur Supporting Users ’ Trust Decisions on Inter - Enterprise Collaborations

The thesis addresses the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations, which are particularly useful for small and medium-sized enterprises for attaining competitive edge in fields dominated by large enterprises. Trust decision making regarding joining and continuing the collaboration is an important element of trust management. Inter-enterprise collaborations have trust management systems performing automated trust decision making. However , automated trust decision making is possible only in routine cases while human intervention is required for other cases. Human intervention for trust decision making is an open research question in the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations. To resolve the problem of human intervention in context to inter-enterprise collaborations , literature on trust, trust decision making and development and human behavioral strategies is explored. Based on the literature review, a trust relationship development model is proposed. To evaluate the validity of the proposed model, the thesis applies it to compare three existing trust management systems: TrustCoM, ECOLEAD and Pilarcos. The thesis fcuses on supporting human intervention in the existing Pilarcos trust management system. The proposed trust relationship development model, Nielsen's guidelines and cognitive theories for designing user interfaces are used for designing and implementing a trust decision expert tool. The trust decision expert tool is evaluated on four dimensions: information sufficiency, usability, user performance and quality. The master thesis contributes to the existing knowledge by providing guidelines for designing and implementing trust decision expert tools handling human intervention in the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations. The proposed trust decision expert tool provides a basis for developing similar expert tool for other trust management systems. Acknowledgements The work that began as a small bud has now blossomed to a beautiful flower in the form of a master thesis. First and foremost, I would like to thank my " Akal Purak " for giving me strength and inspiration throughout my graduate studies and writing this master thesis. The journey of this master thesis started in the beginning of this year when I was looking for a subject that matches my research interests and skill-set. Fortunately, I found CINCO group (UH) who are well known for their work on inter-enterprise collaborations and published state of the art papers on trust and reputation management. I am really thankful to Lea Kutvonen (UH) and Sini Ruohomaa (UH) who have made this thesis possible at first place by giving me a research position in their group. Through their wisdom and expertise, a challenging …