Assurance Hierarchies in B2C Electronic Commerce

The fluid, dispersed market of e-commerce makes it hard to judge the reliability of participants. While early Internet trust practices merge old practices—acknowledgments, customer surveys, audits—into Web technology, a need exists for better approaches to assurance. Ideally, these trust mechanisms should be inexpensive, scalable, and private. The proposed three-level hierarchy of ever more powerful assurance services, each interoperable with the other, is one means of addressing the varied assurance requirements of e-commerce participants. Particular emphasis is given to making assurance services inexpensive.