This 86-page treatise provides information officers and project managers with a conceptual and computational approach to managing trust and reputation in the e-commerce world. The author is a faculty member at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Despite containing mathematical and computationally technical sections, the discussion is accessible to generalists. Topics are presented briefly and crisply without excessive verbiage, and each chapter ends with a lengthy list of references.

After a brief introduction, chapter 2 provides an overview of trust and reputation in philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, economics, and management. Computational models based on Marsh’s formalism, subjective logic, and qualitative assessment dynamics (QAD) are noted. Of particular interest are eBay’s reputation system, Mui’s reputation model, Yu and Singh’s model, the beta reputation system, ReGreT, and others. A somewhat detailed description of the Alfa TestBed (ATB) is provided since “its main advantage is that the decision making process is taken into account when evaluating the various research methods and models.” An implementation-based taxonomy provides a useful methodology for understanding the various systems.

Another notable chapter, “An Implementation Roadmap,” begins with the obvious importance of interconnectivity to existing systems and understanding precisely what a given organization needs. A planning flowchart and the workings of representational state transfer (REST) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) are provided. Methods of “extracting content from general data” are reviewed, as are attacks and countermeasures. Finally, the author comments on the future evolution of trust and reputational management systems in the Internet of Things (IoT).

While lacking a general index, this compact book includes a significant amount of informative content. It is a worthy addition to the literature on this important topic.