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Monopolizing markets by exploiting trust

Published: 08 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate trust-based relationships in electronic supply chains where trust is a measure of consistency in meeting negotiated contract deadlines. We consider scenarios where contractors assign contracts to contractees who are significantly more successful in meeting deadlines. The task deadlines are drawn from a known distribution. We present a probabilistic analysis that enables contractees to strategically bid on only certain tasks to earn the trust of their contractors. Once a contractee achieves a high level of trust, it can then exploit that trust to increasingly corner a larger portion of the market share of all tasks. We present a trust exploitation scheme that monopolizes the market against greedy contractees who bid on all announced tasks. We also show that such market monopolization is not possible in the presence of a trusted, but non-exploiting, contractee. The exploiter can, however, effectively "starve" the non-exploiting trusted agent.

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  • (2011)Intertemporal Discount Factors as a Measure of Trustworthiness in Electronic CommerceIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2010.14123:5(699-712)Online publication date: 1-May-2011
  • (2010)Comprehensive trust managementProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 110.5555/1838206.1838487(1573-1574)Online publication date: 10-May-2010
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cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
May 2006
1631 pages
ISBN:1595933034
DOI:10.1145/1160633
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. markets
  2. monopoly
  3. supply chains
  4. trust

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)Extensive experimental validation of a personalized approach for coping with unfair ratings in reputation systemsJournal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research10.4067/S0718-187620110003000056:3(43-64)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2011
  • (2011)Intertemporal Discount Factors as a Measure of Trustworthiness in Electronic CommerceIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2010.14123:5(699-712)Online publication date: 1-May-2011
  • (2010)Comprehensive trust managementProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 110.5555/1838206.1838487(1573-1574)Online publication date: 10-May-2010
  • (2008)Seller bidding in a trust-based incentive mechanism for dynamic e-marketplacesProceedings of the Canadian Society for computational studies of intelligence, 21st conference on Advances in artificial intelligence10.5555/1788714.1788748(368-379)Online publication date: 28-May-2008
  • (2008)A Detailed Comparison of Probabilistic Approaches for Coping with Unfair Ratings in Trust and Reputation SystemsProceedings of the 2008 Sixth Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust10.1109/PST.2008.16(189-200)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2008
  • (2008)A Trust-Based Incentive Mechanism for E-MarketplacesTrust in Agent Societies10.1007/978-3-540-92803-4_8(135-161)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2008
  • (2008)Seller Bidding in a Trust-Based Incentive Mechanism for Dynamic E-MarketplacesAdvances in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-540-68825-9_34(368-379)Online publication date: 2008

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