Introduction

Why bother with the problem of representing trust? For many people, trust is an emotion that is not, by definition, amenable to representation. For this reason, they will argue, attempts to design online infrastructure to support the formation and maintenance of trust for commercial partnerships are misplaced. This chapter takes a different position. Trust is treated as a form of tacit knowledge that can be made explicit to some extent by means of knowledge management techniques such as codification and pattern matching. The authors explore the issues of interpersonal trust by means of a case study of partnerships among small firms where remoteness, and/or lack of time, preclude the long-term build-up of trusting relationships. These conditions are characteristic of many e-commerce transactions. We argue that far from being trust-free, such transactions require as much awareness of trust as traditional situations, and that infrastructure and process may be designed to support trustful interaction. In the text that follows, we review a number of studies of interpersonal trust, and extract an argument from these for the specification of an online platform for partnering that may allow trust to be assessed in the early stages of the formation of partnerships. Readers who require a more comprehensive review of trust studies are referred to the chapter by Marsh and Dibben (2003).