Building Trust in Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Electronic Communities

Many players in electronic markets have to cope with much higher amount of uncertainty as to quality and reliability of the products they buy and the information they obtain from other peers in the respective online business communities. One way to address this uncertainty problem is to use information such as feedbacks about past experiences to help making recommendation and judgment on product quality and information reliability. This paper presents PeerTrust, a simple yet effective reputation-based trust mechanism for quantifying and comparing the trustworthiness of peers in a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic marketplace. There are three main contributions in this paper. First, we argue that the trust models based solely on feedbacks from other peers in the community is inaccurate and ineffective. We introduce three basic trust parameters in computing trust within an electronic community. In addition to feedbacks in terms of amount of satisfaction, we incorporate the feedback context such as the total number of transactions and the credibility of the feedback sources into the PeerTrust model for evaluating the trustworthiness of peers. Second, we develop a basic trust metric that combines the three critical parameters to compare and quantify the trustworthiness of peers. Third, we present a concrete method to validate the proposed trust model and report the set of initial experiments, showing the feasibility, costs, and benefits of our approach.