Managing Trust in Business Webs Using Game Theory

Business webs are collections of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer need. We design business webs using value models that show the participating stakeholders and the value objects which they are going to exchange during a specific period. Each partner agrees to act according to the value model, however during the business, stakeholders need to be sure if their partners are acting according to the value model or not. In some cases, the best way to find out the answer of that question is to run an inspection because the value exchanges are not observable without cost. Now, the crucial question here is "how often a stakeholder needs to run an inspection and how these inspections affect the expected payoffs of the stakeholders?". Here in this paper, using game theory concepts and techniques, we aim at finding out answers for these questions.