Studying How E-Markets Evaluation Can Enhance Trust in Virtual Business Communities

430 Studying How E-Markets Evaluation Can Enhance Trust in Virtual Business Communities

applied evaluation instrument. The e-market recommendation problem is therefore a multi-
criteria decision making one.

According to the multi-criteria decision making literature (Roy, 1996; Jacquet-Lagreze &
Siskos, 2001), each criterion is a non-decreasing real valued function defined on CxS as
follows:

g_i : C × S → K / s → g_i (s ) ∈ K

where g_i (s) is the evaluation of the e-market s on the i^th criterion ( i =1,..., n ). Thus, the multi-

criteria evaluation of an e-market s^∈ S is given as a vector g(s)   or

We have previously assumed that the evaluation instrument to

be used for evaluating all e-markets in the context of the VC will be the same. In this version of
the algorithm, we choose the WebQual instrument (Barnes & Vidgen, 2002) and therefore the
criteria set is: Usability (g₁), Information Quality (g₂), and Service Interaction Quality (g₃).

The developers of WebQual claim that these criteria are independent and sufficient for
measuring the satisfactions of users from e-commerce resources. The above criteria take
values from a 7-point scale {1,.,7}, where ‘1’ is the lower value of the criterion, and ‘7’ the
higher one. Since each criterion g_i is a non-decreasing real valued function, and that there is
no uncertainty during the decision making, the total utility of an e-market s^∈ S for a business
partner c^∈ C can be expressed as:

where g^c_i(s) is the evaluation value of e-market s on criterion g_i, and w^c_i is a weight indicating
the importance of criterion g_i for the particular business partner c, with:

∑³ w^c = 1

i=1 ⁱ

The linear function of Eq.(3) is the simplest and most popular form of an additive value
function, according to the principles of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). Others could
include an ideal point model, dependencies and correlations, as well as diminishing utility
forms (Price & Messinger, 2005).

Assuming that there has been a subset of business partners M in the overall community C (that
is ^{M ⊆ C} ) that has evaluated a subset of e-markets K from the whole population of available
e-markets S (that is ^{K ⊆ S}), then the following hold:

• For each business partner ^{m ∈ M} that has evaluated an e-market ^{k ∈ K} , this evaluation is
^m  mmm

defined as the vector ^{g g 1} ʊ,^g2   '^{, g3} ' ²∙∣, and there is also a set of importance

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