Time-decay-based reputation method for buyers making decisions in online shopping

Trust and reputation is considered a significant part of the Internet marketing. Internet transactions or interactions involve anonymity of participants, which are more risky on account of uncertainty about the quality of service or identity of service providers. Reputation system is a mechanism to determine who is trustworthy and induce Internet marketing's participants to maintain a good reputation while performing Internet activities. We consider that the evaluation of service provider's reputation or participant's honesty and responsibility constrained in some way by three factors, they are service quality, transaction time, and dollar value involved in the transaction(s), we called them as triple constraint. Very little research had done to pinpoint the relationship between trust and reputation with this triple constraint, especially when trust decay and time decay factors involved in the reputation evaluation process. We propose and investigate a novel dynamic trust and reputation framework based on the three factors mentioned above to reflect the more realistic reputation of the service providers in the Internet market.