Initial trust for new services Sample Clauses

Initial trust for new services. In the discussion so far, we assume that a service provider provides one type of service. However, in the SOC environment, the service providers might be able to provide multiple types of services with respective service identifications. Accordingly, in ServiceTrust, a service consumer’s trust over a service provider is service specific, and is estimated based on the service provider’s historic performance over individual types of services. One issue that may occur is that when a service provider starts offering a new service, there is no historic performance information about the new service for service consumers to refer to. In this case, a service consumer’s trust for this new service cannot be evaluated. The development of a service consumer’s initial trust for a new service usually goes through two stages: an exploratory stage and a commitment stage, which reflects the general belief in the trust literature [10]. At the exploratory stage, the service provider’s reputation will influence the service consumer’s intention to trust the service provider. At the commitment stage, experience-based knowledge will readily replace the tentative trust built at the exploratory stage [71]. Another factor that influences a service provider’s tentative trust over a service provider is its familiarity with the service provider [34, 67]. Familiarity is referred to as understanding of the context which the service transaction is involved, and hence is considered the precondition for tentative trust [67]. From the perspectives of both the reputation and the context, we assume that a service provider with good reputation obtained from its existing services tends to provide the new service at a high success rate. This assumption is acceptable at least at the early stage of the new service’s appearance because the service provider has to cater for the service consumers in order to quickly develop its reputation for the new service and to attract more potential service consumers [76]. Therefore, a service consumer’s initial trust for a new service can be estimated through looking into the service provider’s reputations for its existing services. We evaluate a service provider’s global reputation by aggregating its reputations for individual services. The estimation of a service consumer’s initial trust for the new service is based on the service provider’s global reputation. After interacting with the service provider, the service consumer can gradually incorporate its dire...