Improving the Efficiency of an Online Marketplace by Incorporating Forgiveness Mechanism

Reputation plays a key role in online marketplace communities improving trust among community members. Reputation works as a decision-making tool for understanding the behavior of the business partners. Success of any online business depends on the trust the business agents share with each other. However, untrustworthy agents have anno place in online marketplaces and are forced to leave the market even if they will potentially cooperate. In this study, we propose an exploration strategy based on a forgiveness mechanism for untrustworthy agents to recover their reputation. Furthermore, a number of experiments based on the NetLogo simulation are performed to validate the applicability of the proposed mechanism. The results show that the online marketplaces incorporating a forgiveness mechanism can be used with the existing reputation systems and improve the efficiency of online marketplaces.