Paper Title
A Co-Utile Distributed Reputation Mechanism For The Electronic Commerce

Abstract
Consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like that of eBay suffer from the mistrust effect between the transacting agents. This is due to the information asymmetry and market uncertainty in this like e-commerce markets. Hence, this paper presents a distributed co-utile reputation protocol as a trust-building tool in the electronic market. The protocol is an extension to the well-known Eigen Trust reputation mechanism with a co-utile and distributed way of computation. The global reputation score of each peer is based on the local reputation scores of the peers (buyers and sellers) sourced from the set of the direct transaction in the network. The protocol is attack-tolerant and uses the mechanism of assigning the worst possible reputation score to the malicious peers through the zero reputation score initialization, together with the underlying assumptions of the pre-trusted peers of the network and transitive trust. Keywords: Trust, e-commerce, Global Reputation, Local Reputation.