Seller's credibility in electronic markets: a complex network based approach

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of online commercial activity enabled by the World Wide Web. An electronic marketplace (e-market) provides an online method to perform transactions between buyers and sellers, potentially supporting all of the steps in the entire order fulfillment process. Credibility is an important requirement for the success of an e-market. In this work we model and characterize an e-market as a complex network and use the network structure to investigate the sellers' credibility. We propose a new algorithm, based on the structure of the negotiation network, to recommend whether the seller is trustable or not. We use real data from a online marketplace from the biggest Brazilian Internet Service Provider as case study. Besides being a prelimary work, our technique achieves good results in terms of accuracy, predicting correctly the results in more than 80%. It can be used to provide a more effective reputation system for electronic negotiations, which can be very useful as a support decision mechanism for buyers.

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