Abstract
In life, trust is considered the base of all relationships, including Business-to-Business (B2B) relationships. The selection of a supplier depends not only on its reputation and the costs involved, but also on its trustworthiness and other factors. But how can the trustworthiness of a supplier be measured? What are the factors that influence the supplier’s trustworthiness, i.e., what are the relevant factors of trust in the selection of a supplier in a B2B relationship? Answers to these questions will help model the supplier agents’ behavior in the multi-agent ANTE platform. In this paper we propose to consider fifteen attributes to measure the trustworthiness of a supplier as a conceptual model of trust, coming out of a combination of several determinants gathered from the literature review. Raw data was gathered by sending a questionnaire to a set of firms from different industrial sectors. The results support part of the proposed determinants, introducing new determinants of trust that resulted from exploratory factor analysis and a new model obtained from confirmatory factor analysis. With this, two possible multi-attribute supplier agents can be modeled. This paper discusses the results and limitations of this study and proposes suggestions for future work.
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Alves, P., Campos, P., Oliveira, E. (2012). Modeling the Trustworthiness of a Supplier Agent in a B2B Relationship. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Xu, L., Afsarmanesh, H. (eds) Collaborative Networks in the Internet of Services. PRO-VE 2012. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 380. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32775-9_67
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32775-9_67
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