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Trust-oriented buyer strategies for seller reporting and selection in competitive electronic marketplaces

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Abstract

In competitive electronic marketplaces where some selling agents may be dishonest and quality products offered by good sellers are limited, selecting the most profitable sellers as transaction partners is challenging, especially when buying agents lack personal experience with sellers. Reputation systems help buyers to select sellers by aggregating seller information reported by other buyers (called advisers). However, in such competitive marketplaces, buyers may also be concerned about the possibility of losing business opportunities with good sellers if they report truthful seller information. In this paper, we propose a trust-oriented mechanism built on a game theoretic basis for buyers to: (1) determine an optimal seller reporting strategy, by modeling the trustworthiness (competency and willingness) of advisers in reporting seller information; (2) discover sellers who maximize their profit by modeling the trustworthiness of sellers and considering the buyers’ preferences on product quality. Experimental results confirm that competitive marketplaces operating with our mechanism lead to better profit for buyers and create incentives for seller honesty.

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Notes

  1. \(R\) is not necessarily equal to \(\mathbf{R}\) but in the experiments of this paper we assume that they are the same. The model can also be applied to the case where the value of \(R\) is different for each buyer.

    Table 2 Prisoner’s dilemma payoff matrix
    Full size table

  2. Here, we choose a set of sellers \(S \subset \{s_1,\ldots ,s_m\}\) with whom buyer \(b\) has sufficient experience, to make sure that the buyer has sufficient knowledge to judge the advisers.

  3. We notice that a trust-aware FSBP auction model is not an application but an extension built on the previous work.

  4. In [6] each quality attribute \(i\) is characterized with a particular coefficient, which is identical for all sellers. In our model, we consider all coefficients as \(1\).

  5. The buyers adopting the ALLC and ALLD strategies only model the competency of advisers, that is \(T_r(a_i) = C_o(a_i)\).

  6. That is the reason why we only show one figure to present the profit of sellers in different types of environments.

    Fig. 30
    figure 30

    The profit of different types of sellers in trust-aware FSBP auction

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada

    Zeinab Noorian & Michael Fleming

  2. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jie Zhang & Yuan Liu

  3. Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada

    Stephen Marsh

Authors
  1. Zeinab Noorian
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  2. Jie Zhang
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  3. Yuan Liu
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  4. Stephen Marsh
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  5. Michael Fleming
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Correspondence to Zeinab Noorian.

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Noorian, Z., Zhang, J., Liu, Y. et al. Trust-oriented buyer strategies for seller reporting and selection in competitive electronic marketplaces. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 28, 896–933 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-013-9243-z

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