Abstract—Trust decisions on inter-enterprise collaborations involve a trustor’s subjective evaluation of its willingness to participate in a specific collaboration, given the risks and in-centives involved. We have built support for automating routine trust decisions based on a combination of risk, reputation and incentive information. To handle non-routine decisions, we must provide human users with a way to interface with this system and gain access to supporting information. Current collaboration management systems are missing the concepts, processes and interfaces for enabling user involvement. In this paper, we present two key contributions towards enabling user involvement in trust decision making for inter-enterprise collaborations: i) We have studied existing literature on human trust decision making perspectives, and produced a set of criteria for trust decisions. We analyze how three collaboration management systems support these criteria. ii) We provide a more detailed case study of enabling these features in our Pilar-cos collaboration management system through implementing a trust decision expert tool prototype, and report the results of our user experiments on it. Keywords-trust decisions; inter-enterprise collaborations; col-laboration management middleware; user interfaces I.

The thesis addresses the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations, which are particularly useful for small and medium-sized enterprises for attaining competitive edge in fields dominated by large enterprises. Trust decision making regarding joining and continuing the collaboration is an important element of trust management. Inter-enterprise collaborations have trust management systems performing automated trust decision making. However, automated trust decision making is possible only in routine cases while human intervention is required for other cases. Human intervention for trust decision making is an open research question in the domain of inter-enterprise collaborations. To resolve the problem of human intervention in context to inter-enterprise collaborations, literature on trust, trust decision making and development and human behavioral strategies is explored. Based on the literature review, a trust relationship development model is proposed. To evaluate the validity of the proposed model, the thesis applies it to compare three existing trust management systems: