Evaluation of Online Markets Considering Trust and Resilience: A Framework for Predicting Customer Behavior in E-Commerce

Abstract

The evolution of electronic commerce has led to expanding online markets due to convenience, online incentives, greater access to information, broader selections, competition, pricing, product quality, and lead time, i.e., the time that it takes to deliver the products after an order is placed. However, online markets have captured less attention in environments where consumers are concerned about the security and privacy of their personal data. Such concerns can be due to several reasons, from the reluctance in using electronic commerce to the lack of trust and reliability of web vendors. In this paper, we study trust and resilience engineering in such online markets and identify the most and least significant factors impacting online shopping systems. To tackle the inherent uncertainties of data used in our analysis, we propose a Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA) model and validate our findings. Numerical examples show the efficiency of the proposed method in evaluating online and offline shopping systems with respect to trust and resilience.