RepRev: Mitigating the negative effects of misreported ratings

Abstract

Reputation models depend on the ratings provided by buyers to gauge the reliability of sellers in multi-agent based e-commerce environment. However, there is no prevention for the cases in which a buyer misjudges a seller, and provides a negative rating to an original satisfactory transaction. In this case, how should the seller get his reputation repaired and utility loss recovered? In this work, we propose a mechanism to mitigate the negative effect of the misreported ratings. It temporarily inflates the reputation of the victim seller with a certain value for a period of time. This allows the seller to re-cover his utility loss due to lost opportunities caused by the misreported ratings. Experiments demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.