A Two Phases Reputation-Based Model for Selecting Trusted Partners

Abstract

Partner selection is a key issue in supply chain management, owing to its role as the critical starting point in supply chains. However, trust is crucial among supply chain participants, and lack of trust is a significant barrier to establishing collaborative partnership. This study presented a method for selecting trusted collaborative partners which comprised two phases: (1) discovery phase, during which a requestor (i.e. namely a trustor) discovered the partner candidates (i.e. namely trustees) that were willing and claimed to be capable of collaborating, and (2) selection phase, during which the trustor selected the most reputable trustees using referral and reputation systems. This study adopts referral networks to identify the objective and subjective testimonies of partner candidates from third parties (i.e. namely raters) who had previously collaborated with the trustees, and this information was then aggregated to yield a trust score. The trustee with highest score was selected as a collaborative partner. We hope the proposed model can effectively help enterprises select collaborative partners with good competence, goodwill and predictability.