Identifying buyers with similar seller rating models and using their opinions to choose sellers in electronic markets

In this paper, we provide a model for designing buyers that can learn to identify trustworthy friends that are honest and share similar opinions in a decentralised electronic market. The buyer rates a seller after having purchased goods from it. It also evaluates friends who provide seller information when requested, to determine their truthfulness, similarity in opinions regarding product expectations, and to identify the differences between its own and its friends' seller rating mechanisms. Trustworthy friends are identified, and the seller ratings provided by them are adjusted to account for the differences in rating systems and then utilised to evaluate sellers. We conducted experiments to confirm that a buyer using the proposed model is able to accurately identify trustworthy friends, accurately adjust the seller reputation ratings provided by them and has higher gains than a buyer acting alone.

[1]  Daniel Kuokka,et al.  Supporting Information Retrieval via Matchmaking , 1995 .

[2]  Claudia V. Goldman,et al.  Equilibria Strategies for Selecting Sellers and Satisfying Buyers , 2001, CIA.

[3]  Jordi Sabater-Mir,et al.  Repage: REPutation and ImAGE Among Limited Autonomous Partners , 2006, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[4]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  An integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent systems , 2006, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[5]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  A scalable comparison-shopping agent for the World-Wide Web , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[6]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods , 1996, PAAM.

[7]  Munindar P. Singh,et al.  A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities , 2000, CIA.

[8]  Robin Cohen,et al.  Sharing Models of Sellers amongst Buying Agents in Electronic Marketplaces , 2005 .

[9]  R. Cohen,et al.  Reputation-oriented reinforcement learning strategies for economically-motivated agents in electronic market environments , 2004 .

[10]  J. Sabater-Mir,et al.  Trust and reputation for agent societies , 2002 .

[11]  E. Durfee,et al.  The Impact of Nested Agent Models in an Information Economy , 1996 .

[12]  Costas Tsatsoulis,et al.  Reputation based buyer strategy for seller selection for both frequent and infrequent purchases , 2007, ICINCO-RA.

[13]  Giorgos Zacharia,et al.  Trust management through reputation mechanisms , 2000, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[14]  C. Tsatsoulis,et al.  An Investigation of Sharing Seller Reputation among Buyers in Agent-Based Markets , 2007, Third International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS'07).