Modeling the rational behavior of individuals on an e-commerce system

Artikel

With the increasing popularity of e-commerce systems, commercial transactions are becoming more and more frequent. Such transactions are not direct but mediated, putting the buyer in a position of weakness with respect to the seller, especially in the case of a failure of a transaction. The literature showed that the reputation can play an important role to reduce the risks of the buyer in the current e-commerce environment. An online reputation management system (RMS) maintains the reputation, made of beliefs and/or opinions, that are generally held about someone or something, and it can guarantee the reliability of the transactions that take place in an e-commerce system. Despite of the fact that the basic element of a RMS - the interaction between the seller and the buyer - is a classical field of application of the Game Theory (GT) methodologies, the use of a GT approach in this context seems quite limited and this is probably due to its solution complexity. A way to deal with such a complexity is by exploiting the capability of the agent based simulation (ABS) approach. In this paper, we propose a hybrid GT and ABS model for the analysis of an e-commerce system in which a centralized reputation system is maintained by a trusted third party. We report an extensive quantitative analysis in order to validate the proposed model, and to evaluate the impact of a set of buyers' and sellers' policies on the behavior of the e-commerce system.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Operations Research Perspectives ; ISSN: 2214-7160 ; Volume: 5 ; Year: 2018 ; Pages: 22-31 ; Amsterdam: Elsevier

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: Game theory ; Simulation ; Behavioral OR ; Decision making

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Aringhieri, Roberto ; Duma, Davide ; Fragnelli, Vito
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Elsevier
• (where): Amsterdam
• (when): 2018

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1016/j.orp.2017.12.001
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/246336
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:46 AM CET