On Desideratum for B2C E-Commerce Reputation Systems

This paper reviews existing approaches to reputation systems, their constraints as well as available solutions. Furthermore, it presents and evaluates a novel and comprehensive reputation model devoted to the distributed reputation system for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce applications that overcomes the discussed drawbacks. The algorithm offers a comprehensive approach as it considers a number of issues that have a bearing on trust and reputation such as age of ratings, transaction value, credibility of referees, number of malicious incidents, collusion and unfair ratings. Moreover, it also extends the existing frameworks based on information about past behaviour, with other aspects affecting online trading decisions which relate to the characteristic of the providers, such as existence of trustmark seals, payment intermediaries, privacy statements, security/privacy strategies, purchase protection/insurance, alternative dispute resolutions as well as the existence of first party information.