Lack of trust has been repeatedly identified as one of the most formidable barriers to people for engaging in e-commerce, involving transactions in which financial and personal information is submitted to merchants via the Internet. The future of e-commerce is tenuous without a general climate of online trust. Building consumer trust on the Internet presents a challenge for online merchants and is a research topic of increasing interest and importance. This paper provides an overview of the nature and concepts of trust from multi-disciplinary perspectives, and it reviews relevant studies that investigate the elements of online trust. Also, a framework of trust-inducing interface design features articulated from the existing literature is presented. The design features were classified into four dimensions, namely (1) graphic design, (2) structure design, (3) content design, and (4) social-cue design. By applying the design features identified within this framework to e-commerce web site interfaces, online merchants might then anticipate fostering optimal levels of trust in their customers.

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With information overload a real problem, especially on the Internet, there has been much interest in developing effective and efficient information retrieval (IR) systems. The various information retrieval approaches will require accurate evaluation to justify the requisite substantial development and implementation investment. Recently, a comprehensive and integrated evaluation model has been proposed and illustrated. By analyzing the evaluation measures using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the model transforms IR evaluation into a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, which assesses both the IR outcome and the interactive IR process. This paper extends that research by refining the evaluation model and by testing the research question through mathematical testing and simulation. The tests confirm the need to include both process and outcome criteria in any IR evaluation and prove the superiority of the proposed decisiontheoretic approach over the traditional evaluation methodologies that focus on the IR outcome alone.

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