A reputation system for e-marketplaces based on pairwise comparison

Implementing a reputation system is an effective strategy to facilitate trust and security in an online environment. In addition to that, reputation systems can help online customers through decision-making process. However, in real-world situations, these systems have to deal with plenty of problems and challenges. This paper aims to solve four problems that are common to reputation systems in e-marketplaces, namely the subjectivity of ratings, inequality of transactions, multi-context reputation and dynamic behavior of users. The proposed model starts with the pairwise comparison, which is a powerful tool for removing bias from ratings. Then, we extend the concept of pairwise comparison to contests between users. A pairwise comparison has only a winner and a loser, but we can associate a score differential with a pairwise comparison when we consider it as a match. This score differential is adjusted in a way that three other problems can be solved. We implemented our model in a multi-agent simulation in which real-world data were also incorporated. We compared our model with some of previous reputation systems. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous ones when faced with real-world challenges.