A Formal Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Model for Product Evaluation in E-Commerce

Due to the inherent nature of e-commerce, customers usually have to take certain level of risks while shopping online. To deal with such risks and their associated uncertainty, most of the e-commerce websites provide product review ranking services to help customers to make purchase decisions. However, such services are typically not reliable because the ranking results are usually based on the averages of review scores given by different reviewers without considering their reliability. In this paper, we propose a formal cost-effectiveness analysis model for product evaluation in e-commerce, which takes the reliability of each review into consideration. We define four pieces of evidence, namely positive reviews, the number of positive reviews, negative reviews, and the number of negative reviews, and combine them using the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory. Based on the belief values about the product, we can calculate its effectiveness, and further derive its cost-effectiveness value by considering its minimal price. By ranking various products sold by different vendors based on their cost-effectiveness values, our approach can greatly help customers to make decisions on selecting the most cost-effective products for online purchasing. Keywords-E-commerce; product reviews; cost-effectiveness; reasoning under uncertainty; Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory.