Online Trust: Definition and Principles

Trust is as significant a factor for successful online interactions as it is in offline communities. Trust is an important factor to predict the behaviour of an entity and as a criterion for an entity selection. Most trust studies focused on trust establishment without identifying and considering the main trust definition components and trust principles. This paper explores trust in the offline and the online world to extract important trust definition components and trust principles. The trust definition and principles are presented, which form a basis that should be followed to establish trust online.