A Study on Reputation Systems in Internet Market

Abstract

Trust and reputation is considered a significant part of the Internet marketing. They are tightly coupled and platform-independent components that allows communications being carried out during processes between participants. Internet transactions or interactions involve anonymity of participants, which are more risky on account of uncertainty about the quality of service or identity of service providers. Reputation system is a mechanism to determine who is trustworthy and induce Internet marketing’s participants to maintain a good reputation while performing Internet activities. We consider that the evaluation of service provider’s reputation or participant’s honesty and responsibility constrained in some way by three factors, they are service quality, transaction time, and dollar value involved in the transaction(s), we called them as triple constraint. Although, there has been considerable theoretical research and practical implementation work done in trust or reputation on Internet marketing, very little research done to pinpoint the relationship between trust and reputation with this triple constraint, especially when trust decay and time decay factors involved in the reputation evaluation process. We propose and investigate a novel dynamic trust and reputation framework based on the three factors mentioned above to reflect the more realistic reputation of the service providers in the Internet market. The proposed system model has been verified through a series of simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate decay factors into reputation evaluation process. The simulation experiments results have indicated that reputation systems can signal current level of reputation of being evaluated service providers and can be benefit only if the providers have performed certain number of Internet transactions or services.