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

Roberto Aringhieri, Davide Duma and Vito Fragnelli ()

Operations Research Perspectives, 2018, vol. 5, issue C, 22-31

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Game theory; Simulation; Behavioral OR; Decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214716017302051
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:oprepe:v:5:y:2018:i:c:p:22-31

DOI: 10.1016/j.orp.2017.12.001

Access Statistics for this article

Operations Research Perspectives is currently edited by Rubén Ruiz Garcia

More articles in Operations Research Perspectives from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().