A Quantitative Evaluation Approach of Subjective Trust for E-Commerce

For E-commerce, such as online trade and interactions on the Internet are on the rise, a key issue is how to use simple and effective evaluation methods to accomplish trust decision-making for customers. It is well known subjective trust holds uncertainty like randomness and fuzziness. However, existing approaches commonly based on probability or fuzzy set theory cannot attach enough importance to uncertainty. To remedy this problem, a new quantificational subjective trust evaluation approach is proposed based on the cloud model. The subjective trust may be modeled with cloud model, and expected value and hyper-entropy of subjective cloud is used to evaluate the reputation of trust objects. Our experimental data shows that the method can effectively support subjective trust decision, which provides a helpful exploitation for the subjective trust evaluation.