Credibility Based Corrective Mechanism for Reputation Computation in Peer-to-Peer Communities

Trust plays a key role in each transaction in online peer–to–peer (P2P) communities. Transaction based trust computation is an insufficient mechanism when the number of transactions is less. Reputation plays a major role when a peer transacts with other peers for the first time. Reputation computation which is very close to the reality is very important to all the online transactions. Several methods were proposed in the literature for reputation computation. The mechanism discussed in this paper offers a weighted feedback based reputation computation. In case, a malicious peer deceives by exaggerating or underrating the feedback, the method includes a dynamic corrective procedure, which forces a peer to give correct feedback. Thus, this mechanism attempts to solve the reputation computation problem with minimum overheads of storage and retrieval.