A fuzzy logic based reputation system for E-markets

During the last years, electronic markets (e-markets) are emerging as a new idea of economy, where trade transactions can be performed by buyers and sellers even if they are separated by geographic boundaries, time differences or distance barriers. Unfortunately, in this on-line trade environment, the probability of large-scale fraud and deceit is higher than traditional commerce because of the lack of face-to-face communications. For this reason, reputation systems, which enable to assess the trustiness level of transacting parties, are becoming a fundamental component of any current e-market portal. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy logic based reputation system capable of efficiently assessing transacting parties through the exploitation of 1) a fuzzy trust model which takes into account a set of metrics reflecting the trust human perception both on seller and buyer side and, furthermore, it does not miss to consider past transactions; 2) a fuzzy based reputation aggregation taking into account credibility concept to discriminate false trust values. As shown by performed experiments, the proposed reputation system yields better performance than that used by one of the most known e-markets, eBay®.