An enhanced e-commerce trust model for community based centralized systems

Conventional trust models cannot simultaneously fulfill three major requirements of community based centralized e-commerce systems having a large number of members and economic risk. First, a buyer dealing with a new seller should be able to consult other buyers’ experiences with that seller to make a better decision. Also, a seller with a good reputation should not abuse it by conducting fraudulent transactions. Finally, a buyer with good experience with a seller, even one with a bad reputation, should be able to continue to deal with that seller. This paper introduces a trust-scoring model (Enhanced E-Commerce Trust Model or E2CTM) to address the above requirements. In E2CTM, a trustor uses personal experience with a trustee and input from other trustors about that trustee. To explore the capability of E2CTM, an online electronic auction shopping system was developed to compare its performance with a conventional trust model used by most electronic shopping systems that uses overall gain and loss of all buyers in simulated auctions as evaluation criteria. The results show the advantage of E2CTM, specifically, in terms of overall performance. The improvement is more significant when there is low percentage of fraudulent transactions in the system.