Abstract
The assessment of credibility and reputation of contractors in online auctions is the key issue in providing reliable environment for customer-to-customer e-commerce. Confident reputation rating system is an important factor in managing risk and building customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, most online auction sites employ a very simple reputation rating scheme that utilizes user feedbacks and comments issued after committed auctions. Such schemes are easy to deceive and do not provide satisfactory protection against several types of fraud. In this paper we propose two novel measures of trustworthiness, namely, credibility and density. We draw inspiration from social network analysis and present two algorithms for reputation rating estimation. Our first algorithm computes the credibility of participants by an iterative search of inter-participant connections. Our second algorithm discovers clusters of participants who are densely connected through committed auctions. We test both measures on real-world data and we experimentally compare them with existing solutions.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aberer, K., Despotovic, Z.: Managing trust in a peer-2-peer information system. In: CIKM ’01: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 310–317, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press (2001)
Ba, S., Whinston, A.B., Zhang, H.: Building trust in online auction markets through an economic incentive mechanism. Dec. Support Syst. 35 (2003)
Beam, C., Segev, A.: Auctions on the Internet: a field study. Technical report, University of California at Berkeley (1998)
Chen, M., Singh, J.P.: Computing and using reputations for Internet ratings. In: EC ’01: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 154–162, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press (2001)
Guha, R., Kumar, R., Raghavan, P., Tomkins, A.: Propagation of trust and distrust. In: WWW ’04: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 403–412, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press (2004)
Houser, D., Wooders, J.: Reputation in auctions: Theory, and evidence from ebay. Technical report, University of Arizona (2001)
Kleinberg, J.M.: Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. In: SODA ’98: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 668–677, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1998
Malaga, R.A.: Web-based reputation management systems: problems and suggested solutions. Electron. Commer. Res. 4(1) (2001)
Melnik, M.I., Alm, J.: Does a seller’s ecommerce reputation matter? Evidence from ebay auctions. J. Ind. Econ. L(3) (September 2002)
Resnick, P., Zeckhauser, R.: Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay’s Reputation System. Advances in Applied Microeconomics, vol. 11. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2002)
Resnick, P., Zeckhauser, R., Friedman, E., Kuwabara, K.: Reputation systems. Commun. ACM 43(12) (2000)
Resnick, P., Zeckhauser, R., Swanson, J., Lockwood, K.: The value of reputation on ebay: a controlled experiment. Technical report (2004)
Snyder, J.M.: Online auction fraud: Are the auction houses doing all they should or could to stop online fraud? Fed. Commun. Law J. 52(2) (2000)
Xiong, L., Liu, L.: A reputation-based trust model for peer-to-peer ecommerce communities. In: EC’03: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 228–229, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Morzy, M. New Algorithms for Mining the Reputation of Participants of Online Auctions. Algorithmica 52, 95–112 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-007-9106-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-007-9106-6