Reputation evaluation for choosing a trustworthy counterparty in C2C e-commerce

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auctions on the web are popular because they provide a private, convenient, and efficient platform of price negotiation for consumers to trade. Insufficient information or the anonymity of sellers and buyers may result in malicious participants who exploit others to gain improper profits. This article proposes several new metrics for online auctions as social networks. We use simulation methods in order to show that malicious participants who have been difficult to identify at other auction websites can be easily identified with our proposed metrics. We also conduct empirical analysis of our proposed trust-evaluation system, which reveals that our approach can identify malicious auction participants earlier and more easily than eBay can.