SocialTrust: Adaptive Trust Oriented Incentive Mechanism for Social Commerce

Abstract—In the absence of legal authorities and enforcement mechanisms in open e-marketplaces, it is extremely challenging for a user to validate the quality of opinions (i.e. ratings and reviews) of products or services provided by other users (referred as advisers). Rationally, advisers tend to be reluctant to share their truthful experience with others. In this paper, we propose an adaptive incentive mechanism, where advisers are motivated to share their actual experiences with their trustworthy peers (friends/neighbors in the social network) in e-marketplaces (social commerce context), and malicious users will be eventually evacuated from the systems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our mechanism in promoting the honesty of users in sharing their past experiences. Keywords-Trust; reputation systems; electronic commerce; in-centive mechanism; I