Reputation based buyer strategy for seller selection for both frequent and infrequent purchases

Previous research in the area of buyer strategies for choosing sellers in ecommerce markets has focused on frequent purchases. In this paper we present a reputation based buyer strategy for choosing sellers in a decentralized, open, uncertain, dynamic, and untrusted B2C ecommerce market for frequent and infrequent purchases. The buyer models the reputation of the seller after having purchased goods from it. The buyer has certain expectations of quality and the reputation of a seller reflects the seller’s ability to provide the product at the buyer’s expectation level, and its price compared to its competitors in the market. The reputation of the sellers and the price quoted by the sellers are used to choose a seller to transact with. We compare the performance of our model with other strategies that have been proposed for this kind of market. Our results indicate that a buyer using our model experiences a slight improvement for frequent purchases and significant improvement for infrequent purchases.