A reputation system for electronic negotiations

In this paper we first present a system architecture enabling market participants to carry out bilateral and multi-attributive electronic negotiations with each other. Since this system uses open and anonymous communication networks, market participants have to cope with much higher mount of uncertainty about the quality of products and the trustworthiness of other participants. Therefore, we present a reputation system, which facilitates trust building among business partners who interact in an ad-hoc manner with each other. The system enables market participants to rate the business performance of their partners as well as the quality of offered goods. These ratings are the basis for evaluating the trustworthiness of market participants and the quality of their goods. The ratings are aggregated using the concept of Web of Trust. This approach leads to robustness of the proposed system against malicious behavior aiming at manipulating the reputation of market participants. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.