Expert validation on a reference model for e-auctions that conform to Islamic trading principles

Abstract

E-auction is considered as one of the most successful e-commerce applications where there are millions of items auctioned in thousands of auction sites. Despite its unrivaled success, e-auction faces significant doubts from an Islamic perspective with regards to the legitimacy to Islamic trading principles. The in-depth investigations on the conventional e-auction systems and methods reveal several incompliant features such as the existence of usury, gambling, and fraud. For instance, payment through credit cards, setting of un-prescribed service charges, imposes non-refundable bidding fees, impersonation, fraudulence, ambiguity, and inflation all are not in alignment with Islamic teachings and thus necessitate the refinement of the e-auction business process. This paper utilizes the conceptual modeling approach to propose a reference model e-auction that Conforms to Islamic Trading Principles. The model forms a tight relation between ICT, Business, and Islamic acts in a way that business makes use of ICT whilst governed by the Islamic rules. In order to evaluate the proposed model from different perspectives, this paper follows a qualitative approach by surveying six experts specialized in business, Islamic jurists, and information technology (two in each field). This is to support the robustness of the proposed model and examine the extent of consensus the model able to gain from a different perspective. The results obtained show a promising acceptance of the proposed model where the overall score average of the experts’ responses achieves 4.47 out of a maximum score five. The average rating of the Islamic jurist's experts, Business experts, and IT experts are 4.49, 4.36, and 4.56 respectively..