Improving the Efficiency of an Online Marketplace by Incorporating Forgiveness Mechanism

Abstract

Reputation plays a key role in online marketplace communities improving trust among community members. Reputation works as a decision-making tool for understanding the behavior of the business partners. Success of any online business depends on the trust the business agents share with each other. However, untrustworthy agents have anno place in online marketplaces and are forced to leave the market even if they will potentially cooperate. In this study, we propose an exploration strategy based on a forgiveness mechanism for untrustworthy agents to recover their reputation. Furthermore, a number of experiments based on the NetLogo simulation are performed to validate the applicability of the proposed mechanism. The results show that the online marketplaces incorporating a forgiveness mechanism can be used with the existing reputation systems and improve the efficiency of online marketplaces.

An Extended Framework for Recovering From Trust Breakdowns in Online Community Settings

“…In this study, we strengthen the concept and computational model of the forgiveness mechanism in our previous work [19] by incorporating two types of incentive mechanisms e.g., financial and reputational incentives, to encourage cooperation among involved participants. The rest of paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we present related work on various trust recovery mechanisms.…”

“…In our previous work [19], a forgiveness mechanism is defined as a function of five positive motivations: intent, history, apology, severity and importance. Intent refers to the extent to which a trust violation is more or less forgivable depending on a victim's attribution of a transgressor's intention.…”

“…Table 1. Positive motivations for evaluating forgiveness from the viewpoints of different forgiveness sources [19].…”

Psychology-Inspired Trust Restoration Framework in Distributed Multiagent Systems

“…In this study, forgiveness and regret are considered as implementable properties for formalizing the incorporation of trust defining a computational model. Forgiveness, in particular, has been extensively studied as a positive method of coping with trust violations in [12,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], while regret, always together with responsibility, is used to form the definition of an apology [13,20,21,[28][29][30][31]. For instance, an apology was defined by [20] as "a decisive public expression regarding both responsibility and regret for a violation of trust."…”

“…Specifically, when a trust violation occurs and a vendor acknowledges the incident, an apology and other appropriate restorative actions will shape the extent to which a victim is willing to reconcile [28,32]. In centralized-based systems, the concept of forgiveness has been proposed in our previous work [23] to explore untrustworthy agents who are capable of fulfilling future transactions. The so-called forgiveness mechanism is a computational model based on five positive motivations, that is, intent, history, apology, severity, and importance.…”